Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion 9780815359883, 9781351119627

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Divinization and Technology

This book offers a political anthropological discussion of subversion, exploring its imbrication with technological and divinization practices, and uncovering some of its particular effects on human existence, from prehistory to the contemporary age. Subversion is often romanticized as a means of opposing or undermining power in the name of supposedly universal values, yet techniques of subversion are actually deployed by people of all modern political and philosophical persuasions. With subversion having become a tool of mainstream ‘power’ that threatens to dominate social and political reality, and so render the populace servile and subject to a generalized culture industry, Divinization and Technology examines the ways in which technology and divinization, with their efforts to unite with divine powers, can be brought together as modalities of subversion. Agnes Horvath is a founding and chief editor of International Political Anthropology. She taught in Hungary, Ireland and Italy, and was affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University. She is the co-author of Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, the co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, and the author of Modernism and Charisma. Camil Francisc Roman is Lecturer in Political Science at the John Cabot University, Roma Tre University and LUMSA University (Libera ­Università Maria Ss. Assunta), Rome. He is also an acting editor of International Political Anthropology. He has published various chapters and papers, and is currently finishing a research monograph for Routledge entitled The French Revolution as a Liminal Process: Understanding the Political Schismogenesis of Modernity (forthcoming 2019). Gilbert Germain is Professor of Political Thought at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. He is the author of several books, including Thinking about Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality and Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology.

Contemporary Liminality Series editors: Arpad Szakolczai, University College Cork, Ireland Series advisory board: Agnes Horvath, University College Cork, Ireland Bjørn Thomassen, Roskilde University, Denmark Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge, UK

This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as ‘­imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically-focused paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling and even going beyond mainstream concepts such as ‘system’ ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, liminality is increasingly considered a new master concept that promises to spark a renewal in social thought. In spite of the fact that charges of Eurocentrism or even ‘moderno-centrism’ are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, it remains the case that most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on taken-for-granted approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking, have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By challenging the assumed neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian foundations of modern social theory, and by helping to shed new light on the fundamental ideas of major figures in social theory, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, whilst also establishing connections between the perspectives gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical anthropology Contemporary Liminality offers a new direction in social thought.

Titles in this series 7 Walling, Boundaries and Liminality A Political Anthropology of Transformations Edited by Agnes Horvath, Marius Ion Benţ a and Joan Davison 8 The Spectacle of Critique From Philosophy to Cacophony Tom Boland 9 Divinization and Technology The Political Anthropology of Subversion Edited by Agnes Horvath, Camil Francisc Roman and Gilbert Germain For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/sociology/series/ASHSER1435

Divinization and Technology The Political Anthropology of Subversion

Edited by Agnes Horvath, Camil Francisc Roman and Gilbert Germain

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Agnes Horvath, Camil Francisc Roman and Gilbert Germain; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Agnes Horvath, Camil Francisc Roman and Gilbert Germain to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-815-35988-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-11962-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

This volume connects three concepts – which in the first instance appear to be unrelated or even contradictory – as constitutive components of our modern existence: technology, divination and subversion. In fact, and as the authors show, technology has a lot to do with human attempts to attain divine power, which at the same time subvert existing order. Provocative, and with what is sure to be a profound impact, this book, with authors from ­multi-disciplinary backgrounds, forces sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, historians, and theologians alike to re-evaluate their pre-­conceived ideas. Ivan Szelenyi, William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology and Political Sciences, Yale University, USA Will the Divine save us? It depends. This book follows a resolute path in explaining why. Human life has been sustained by recurrent addictions to a plenitude that is not always in our cards. The promises of unlimited growth and the ‘trickling down’ of wealth, the building of God’s Kingdom on earth, are not just showing their intrinsic limits. The perceptive and uncompromising explorations of the group of scholars who have contributed to this book show, from a variety of disciplinary and socio-cultural perspectives, how it is the process itself of claiming one’s due with whatever means (ethical, legal, political) that has accelerated the collapse of modern inner-worldly eschatologies. Their serial subversions of ideals of good life in harmony with the cosmos have transformed human sociability into a ‘Game of Thrones’ of mutually imitative, and spiraling competitive, claims and counterclaims. The contributions to the volume suggest how the biopolitical forms of management of social and political life are not the outcome of a mere technocratic summoning of divine omnipotence from the top down. They are increasingly internalized by subjects who intensify and so ‘valorize’ the liminal whirlpool of self-feeding energeia (ενέργεια), as shown by the dynamics developing in such different fields like economic theory, social media, and drinking habits. Armando Salvatore, Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies (Society and Politics), McGill University, Canada

This is a subversive book as it addresses the elephant in the room of modernity: our latent desires and the overt fear and anxiety of becoming gods in a cosmos we have declared to be essentially meaningless and amoral – a declaration which emerges, as the authors claim, out of a social cosmos characterized by subversion and schismogenesis. This is a bleak and yet stimulating description of our modernity; a description, which even though does not guide you to how to save the world, at least explains why it is damned. Manussos Marangoudakis, Professor of Sociology, University of the Aegean, Greece The present volume may, at first blush, seem to propose unlikely connections and resonances among concepts one does not usually associate with one another, namely ‘subversion’, ‘technology’ and ‘divinisation’. This intuitive response should not lead one to ignore the reasoned claims of its authors, for they are as timely as they are significant for any attempt to recuperate a sense of what it means to be a person in the face of a ‘divinising’ technocratic culture that continually, endlessly, ‘subverts’ one’s sense of self, replacing it with uncertainty and mere mimicry. It confronts one with the paradoxical task of ‘subverting subversion’ in the specific sense attributed to the concept here. Bert Olivier, Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy, University of the Free State, South Africa

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Preface

ix x xiii

Agnes Horvath , Camil F rancisc Roman and Gilbert Germain

Introduction: divinisation and technology – the political anthropology of subversion

1

Agnes Horvath , Camil F rancisc Roman and  Gilbert   Germain

1 Stepping into sterility: divinisation and technology

14

Agnes Horvath

2 Technology and the subversion of control

32

Gilbert Germain

3 The modern schismogenesis in European thought and politics, and the rise of the derivative self: subversion as divinizing the void

53

Camil F rancisc Roman

4 The fool’s subversion: technique of estrangement in Bruegel’s work

73

F ederica Montagni

5 The subversion of subversion: critique unto infinity in the ‘social’ media

92

T om B oland

6 Subversion and conversion: from revolutionary communism to dissidence H arald W ydra

110

viii Contents 7 The subversion of virtuous drinking

132

John O ’ Brien

8 Mammon and the subversion of values: a theological analysis

150

Paul T yson

9 Neoclassical economics as a logic of subversion

165

A rpad Sz akolc z ai

Conclusion

187

Agnes Horvath , Camil F rancisc Roman and  Gilbert  Germain

Index

191

Figures

1.1 The ‘Y’ entrance of Font-de-Gaume cave. Photo: Camil Francisc Roman 20 1.2 Cross-legged double ‘Y’ bisons, duplicated movement: Grotte de Lascaux (Dordogne). Image: ‘Panneau des bisons adossées’ © Cliché N. Aujoulat – Centre National de Préhistoire – MCC 23 1.3 Missing movement: circular dynamism – herd of reindeer engraved on the wing bone of an eagle, from La Grotte de la Mairie, Teyjat (Dordogne). Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 24

Contributors

Tom Boland lectures in Sociology at Waterford Institute of Technology. His core interests are in social theory, historical sociology and the sociology of critique. Recent articles have appeared in journals of sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy. With Ray Griffin he is the author of The Sociology of Unemployment (Manchester University Press, 2015), he recently published, The Spectacle of Critique: From Philosophy to Cacophony (Routledge, 2019). Gilbert Germain is Professor of Political Thought at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. The author of several books, including Thinking about Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality and Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology, his body of work focusses on the sociocultural and intellectual impacts of life in the age of technology. Agnes Horvath (PhD, European University Institute, 2000) is a political theorist and sociologist. She was an affiliate Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is a founding and chief editor of the academic journal International Political Anthropology. Her publications include Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (Routledge, 2018, co-authored), Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (Berghahn, 2015, co-edited) and Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013). She also co-edited a special section on ‘Plato and Eros’ for History of Human Sciences (2013) and a special issue on ‘The Political Anthropology of Ethnic and Religious Minorities’ for Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2017). Federica Montagni  is a doctoral student at the University College Cork, Ireland, currently focussing her research on art and technology. Her background in Art History is due to her major degree at the University of Florence, Italy. Interested in Renaissance Prints and Literature, she concluded her Master in Sociology (UCC) with a dissertation on the relationship between imagination and technological reproduction in the work of Andrea Alciato.

Contributors  xi John O’Brien is the Co-Director of the Moral Foundations of Economy and Society Research Centre. He is Lecturer in Sociology in Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. His interests and publications deal with alcohol and psychoactive substances, political leadership and memory. He is the author of States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation (Routledge, 2018) and Statesman: The Politics of Limit and the Liminal (Tivoli Press, 2013, co-edited). Camil Francisc Roman  (PhD, University of Cambridge, 2017) is Lecturer in Political Science at John Cabot University, Roma Tre University and LUMSA University, and is an acting editor of International Political Anthropology. He is a political scientist working across the historically oriented social and human sciences with a view to understanding modernity and the revolutionary phenomenon. Currently he is completing a research monograph for Routledge entitled The French Revolution as a Liminal Process: Understanding the Political Schismogenesis of ­Modernity ­(forthcoming 2019). His latest articles include ‘The French Revolution and the Craft of the Liminal Void: From the Sanctity of Power to the ­Political Power of the Limitless Sacred’ (Historical Sociology, 2018), and ‘The ­Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the Prussian political Imaginary: A Politico-Anthropological Genealogy of the “­ Special” ­German–French Relations’ (Journal of International Relations and Development, 2018). Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland; he previously taught social theory at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. His recent books include Sociology, Religion and Grace: A Quest for the Renaissance (2007), Comedy and the Public Sphere (2013), Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary (2016), Permanent Liminality and Modernity (2017) and Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (2018, co-authored), all by Routledge, and From Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, co-authored, forthcoming). He published articles, among others, in Theory, Culture and Society, the American Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Social Theory, Cultural Sociology, International Sociology and the European Sociological Review. Paul Tyson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland. He is a sociologically inclined philosophical theologian with a particular interest in the doxological and liturgical characteristics of technological secular modernity. He is the author of several books in applied philosophical theology, including Returning to Reality (Cascade, USA, 2014) and De-fragmenting Modernity (Cascade, USA, 2017).

xii Contributors Harald Wydra is Fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. He held visiting fellowships at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Australian National University in Canberra. He was Visiting Professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and the University of Wrocław. He is a founding editor of the academic journal International Political Anthropology. His publications include Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition (Palgrave, 2001), Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2008, co-edited), Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (Berghahn, 2015, co-edited).

Preface

Never take a gift of Olympian Zeus Hesiod, Works and Days, 83 Hesiod expressed this sentiment some 2,800 years ago, realizing the risk of being on the receiving end of divine gifts, which can result in losing the strength to order our life with prudence and care. It appears that the wisdom contained in this warning, that we should beware of inappropriately inserting into our reality considerations that are not derived from there, is lost on us today. The interplay of our life and the divine, and any mediating structures between them, is something which we have been thinking about during the writing of this book, as we now find ourselves living a life, and in a society, where there is very little that is divine, and where façade, spectacle, consumerism and mediated imagery substitute for genuine life. Increasingly, we have come to realize that one of the distinguishing features of modernity is the spread of divinizing, mediating structures which generate subversion that then imprisons us. The way in which subversion can lead to limitless metamorphosis and the generation of abstractions that debilitate us was already incorporated in Protagoras’ ‘secret’ belief that everything could be subversively dismembered as ‘nothing is one thing just by itself’ (Plato, Theaetetus 152c). According to his reasoning, every being can be blended in various proportions if the proper code is found for dismembering, which divinization and technology use with a cold heart and an even colder, lucid and rigorous, rationality. The idea that technology chimes with divinization is closely connected to the ideas of Frances Yates and others, who have traced the origins of modern science to the obscure practice of alchemy. Just as modern science is not the antithesis of alchemy but a way to render effective the alchemical ideal, so modern technology ought to be seen as rooted in one of the most pernicious of occult ideas, the pretence to make man equal to gods. This is revealed particularly in the peculiar obsession with transforming one’s finite, solid body into infinity, as manifested in the career of the word ‘creativity’, a term of relatively recent coinage which by now, through its everyday use, obscures the pretence of being or becoming equal to the creator deity.

xiv Preface In Divinization and Technology our concern ultimately is to tend to the continuity of life in a given, unconstructed reality. Most of the texts collected in this work derive from the Eighth International Political Anthropology Summer School, held in Acquapendente, including its talks and discussions, formal but also informal, like the dinners and swimming in the Bolsena Lake. We are thankful for all the other participants in the Summer School, James Bergmann, Camilla Emmenegger, Lea Friedberg, Daniel Gati, Alexei Gavriel, Rasmus Holm, Macario Lacbawan, Lili Lőrincz, Irena Lovekaite, Christina Luethy, Federica Moretti, Mikkel Mouritzen, Janos Mark Szakolczai, Bjørn Thomassen and Diletta Tonatto, for providing inspiration for the text. We also express our grateful thanks to the library of the European University Institute and, for their always generous and helpful assistance at Routledge, our editor, Neil Jordan, and editorial assistant, Alice Salt. The Editors

Introduction Divinisation and technology – the political anthropology of subversion Agnes Horvath, Camil Francisc Roman and Gilbert Germain The most modern forms of Monism are not corporealist, since they replace body by energy as the ultimate reality. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 180 by magic and sacrifice will bring the moon down, eclipse the sun, and cause storm and sunshine, I shall not believe that any of these things is ­divine, but human, seeing that the power of the godhead is overcome and enslaved by the cunning of man. Hippocrates 1923: 147

About this book This book is explorative, even experimental. Its aim is to offer a pioneering study of the connections between three terms tapping into central aspects of our world: technology, divinisation and subversion. There is no need to introduce the theme of technology, but the other terms seem less self-­ evident, especially as central concerns of the modern world. Subversion is usually understood as an activity trying to undermine and dislocate established powers. However, our book will offer a different angle: it will argue not only that subversion has become a central feature of our existence but that we live inside or within institutionalised subversion. Divinisation might seem an even more odd concern, associated, it seems, with obscure practices or sects. Thus, before we can continue, it merits closer consideration. Divinisation can be understood as an attempt by humans to attain the powers typically associated with the divine. So, divinisation is quite different from the idea of experiencing divine presence, a phenomenon that we will not discuss here and neither question nor refute. But there is a quite similar activity which is performed in the opposite way and related to machinations by which humans try to gain benefits from the divine, by cajoling or even constraining divinities with a paradoxical, unreserved submission to the divine. This activity is covered also by the term ‘divination’, focussing on the

2  Agnes Horvath et al. aspect of predicting the future, and as both express the intention of ‘making divine’, we will use the terms ‘divination’ or ‘divinisation’ interchangeably. How are these three concerns connected, and how can they be seen as central to our world? While the interconnections between divinisation, technology and subversion might seem odd, especially to the modern mindset, they can be illuminated through two of the most foundational figures of modern culture: John Milton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Divinisation and technology were important themes for both of these seminal thinkers. In fact, their joint approach to these concerns is key in understanding why the main works of both these figures, Paradise Lost and Faust, respectively, are at once foundational for modern culture and yet at the same time absolutely unmodern in their dealing with a demonic attempt to destroy the world, on the one hand, and the selling of one’s soul to the devil, on the other. Furthermore, the central objective in both pieces, and the crucial intrigue, is directly tied to the theme of divinisation: ‘be like God’, whispers Lucifer to Eve, and ‘procure eternal youth, thus immortality’, suggests Mephistopheles to Faust. The way to realise these ideals, and the way employed by both Lucifer and Mephistopheles, is highly technological and magical, constituting in fact the point of intersection between the two: this is evident in the manipulations utilised by Mephistopheles, while for Lucifer it can be seen in the trickery involved in his use of masks (the first technology, according to Horvath 2013) and metamorphosis. Furthermore, Goethe directly connects such subversive technological divinisation, through artificial creation, to human sacrifice in the last act of Faust II. The aim of this volume is to illuminate and explain what in the visionary poetic works of Milton and Goethe remains only assumed or intuited. Apart from speaking to the centrality of technology, divinisation and subversion for our present, this collection also deals with the long-standing neglect of their connections. We have become inured to the reality we are living in, and we have a quite understandable hostility towards claims that assert we live inside a subverted world. Recognising subversion as a main factor within mainstream modernity is rendered difficult by the systematic ignoring, inside the dominant, rationalistic and empirical intellectual tradition, of the conceptual tools that could have helped to realise our predicament, such as ‘liminality’ and ‘imitation’. In this regard, the impact of Émile Durkheim, an influential figure in the field of sociology, played a vital role in suppressing the work of Arnold van Gennep and Gabriel Tarde, and their pioneering study of liminality and mimesis as applied to the emerging ­disciplines of anthropology and sociology. Durkheim’s impact inflicted enormous damage to the social sciences and the understanding of modernity. This book is thus part of the effort made by political anthropologists, genealogists and reflexive historical sociologists to overcome this state of affairs. Ignorance of liminal situations and imitative processes is not just a matter of intellectual incuriosity. Liminal moments, situations of crisis or dissolutions of order are very much imitative processes. Mimicry is the easiest way

Introduction  3 to cease to be oneself as mimicry both causes disorder and is an effect of disorder, and – as we argued in Modernism and Charisma (­Horvath, 2013) – is strongly linked to liminality. Mimicry emerges out of liminal conditions, and further proliferates them, by providing a new version or subversion, thus offering to create order out of disorder. This is a movement very close to what Friedrich Nietzsche and later Max Scheler called ressentiment, a falsification of the ‘table of values’ by posing inside them and so taking them away from their authentic bearers. The intellectual neglect of liminal and imitative phenomena by modern European rationalism, exposed so well through Durkheim’s striking expulsion of two of his most insightful and erudite contemporaries from sociological and anthropological thinking, is a further indication of the neglect of these crucial insights into our world.

Technology Concerning technology, the first thing to notice is the almost exclusively positive connotation attributed to it by all major modern ideologies, helped by the confusion generated by an unawareness of liminal situations and imitative processes, rendering the identification of technology as a main source of subversion almost impossible. The problematisation of technology as such was mostly limited to marginalised intellectual movements, such as Luddites or other members of the lunatic fringe. Even those thinkers who argued that technology is by no means simply beneficial, such as Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Franz Borkenau, Michel Foucault or even Jean Baudrillard, were and still are attacked by the mainstream or critical intellectual consensus. In fact, it seems to be not accidental that the modern social theorists who gained the reputation of being especially controversial are also the ones who dared to dissent from the unreserved glorification of modern technology. In contrast to the neglect of the study of subversion, or the valorising of technology, the failure to study divinisation might not seem surprising, given its distinctly non-modern character. Yet this volume will suggest that the subversive character of technology is most clearly revealed when approached from the perspective of the largely unexplored link between technology and divinisation, which ties the former to the obscure practices of divination, alchemy and hermeticism. Technology, according to this reading, is not the opposite of alchemy but a more effective means of realising an end it shares with alchemical magic, namely, to gain godlike powers of mastery over nature. This desire for control and mastery is manifested in the history of the word ‘creativity’, a recently coined term that reflects the modern phantasy of becoming creators, like the presumed Creator God. We thus live in a world that not only does not understand the caution expressed in the motto cited in the Preface but does not even understand that it does not understand it.

4  Agnes Horvath et al. Questioning technology not only is not a socially irresponsible act but is absolutely necessary to regain the sense of balance missing from the modern project to master nature.

Subversion The preceding argument illustrates that despite the relevance of the theme of subversion, it has not been significantly situated on the agenda of social theory since its inception. Much of the last 200 years of political and social history were concerned with liberation from institutional coercion, the ‘empowering’ of individuals and various social groups, and ‘subverting’ estab­ olitical lished authorities. In the same manner, modern and contemporary p and social theory considers every ‘new version’ of thought as advancing the standard by which to think of these realities, believing that the basic principles governing human conduct can be continuously ‘improved’. In this context, subversion was and remains idealised by intellectuals, academics, politicians and artists as a means of opposing or undermining ‘power’ in the name of values such as freedom, equality or solidarity. However, beyond supporting particular political currents, techniques of subversion are deployed by people of all modern political and philosophical persuasions, making it a central tool of mainstream power. A peculiar paradox of power is thus created, closely related to Alexis de Tocqueville’s (2010: 946, 1203) paradox of equality: the more empowerment is desired, pursued and enacted, the more subversion is induced into social reality, resulting in more disempowerment. That the dynamism for producing ever-new and alternative versions of ourselves is absurd is evident from the etymology and conceptual history of the term ‘version’. ‘Version’ refers to the Latin word vertere, ‘turn’, with ‘version’, both in Latin and originally in English, meaning merely a translation of a text. According to this original understanding, the concreteness of beings, living or otherwise, was not challenged by the presence of similar iterations or ‘versions’. For the first occurrence of ‘version’, in English, in the modern sense of ‘alternative’, we have to wait until 1788 and the emergence of the American, French and Industrial revolutions. The Online Etymological Dictionary definition of the new meaning of ‘version’ is particularly revealing, given the way the word today takes on the meaning of ‘multiplied freedom’: no attention, no constraints, just a perpetual growth of excitation. According to this, a ‘version’ is ‘the particular form of a statement, account, report, etc., given by one person or party; an account resting upon limited authority or embodying a particular point of view’. Thus, a ‘version’ is not more but less than the original: it implies a shortcoming or absence, as evidenced by every simple translation, where a translated version can never improve on the original, only mimic it. A ‘version’ therefore is inevitably a ‘sub’-version, as discussed in the chapter of Tom Boland. A ‘version’ itself is already a subversion.

Introduction  5 Differently put, the reification of ‘power’ as the ‘enemy’ leads to the omnipresence and omnipotence of all kinds of impersonal apparatuses of power, as recognised by Max Weber and Michel Foucault. Likewise, correcting alienation only brings more alienation, as revealed in the Marxian ideal of ‘improving’ society, whereby the proposed ‘new order’ manages only to dissolve order and all living content. Foucault’s rejection of discipline, too, only increases discipline, alongside a spiralling growth of ever-new versions of the same, albeit in now more subtle forms. The impersonal forces – ­bureaucratic, technocratic and the like – that insinuate themselves into our modern lives negatively affect human dignity. A major objective of the authors of this volume is to illustrate the various ways that the subversiveness of technology detracts from a substantive sense of personhood.

Divinisation This book shows how subversion became a fundamental criterion for divinisation and technology by pointing out that both are techniques not simply for artificially producing liminality (in other words, by purposefully creating a situation of uncertainty or crisis-mongering) by dematerialisation but also for reanimation. Divinisation and technology dissolve things in order to unite them with the external void – a central term for the book, to be discussed in detail in Chapter 1 – producing an active integration into the void, which is now changing characters from the inside. Once lured into the void, subversive techniques can liminalise every entity, first by eliminating order, ideas and boundaries, and then, in a second step, by pushing the existing framework of reality to its outer boundaries until liminality reaches a turning point or crisis. Lastly, the previous entity becomes sublimated into a deeply fractured and alienated construct that continues to exist only within the artificial whole into which it was forcefully integrated. But in order to emphasise the thematic continuity between subversion and divinisation, it is important to underscore the link between divinisation and its Presocratic origins with air and soul. As Anaximenes argued, the source of everything that moves is the infinite air (as in Kirk and Raven 1963: 144). Anaximenes asserted that gods and things divine arise from air, so their veneration is the first object of divination practice. The second is the recognition that air – and so breath/soul/void – is immortal, always in motion and in change, and therefore that plurality can be effected by the process of connecting air with matter, as if by artificial means everything could come into being again and again, transformed through deprivation (steresis) or subversion. The recognition of this issue helps to explain what was said about disconnected bodies: they strive for connection, to regain fullness again. Deprivation or subversion forced them to desire a transformation. This subversive or new state is the opposite of their authentic, powerful state, the condition of inherent force, as having an inner force is a fundamental attribute of any

6  Agnes Horvath et al. character. Reasoning is a most delicate issue for the Greeks. While it is essential for being a character, it is not indestructible. An enduring liminal condition can break reasoning. Void and the air were regarded as a break or interval for a long time, a sort of separation between beings, which holds them apart and makes them distinct (see Aristotle, Physics, 213b22), as we see with air, which keeps bodies from merging with each other. That air is the site of souls is also an ancient belief, immortalised by Democritus (as in Aristotle On the Soul, 404a1–5), who associated the spherical shape of the soul with ‘motes in the air that appear in the sunbeams that come through our windows’. Aristotle interpreted Democritus’ understanding to mean that these circular air seeds (or particles) are the most important elements of nature because they can penetrate everything and can make things move. But while these particles are able to impart movement in every living being, they are said to have no reasoning power; for this, they need to penetrate bodies and become souls. The result is breathing, another interval in the whole but not yet power; for this, the particles need a reasoned union with the body: reality. To conclude, in the context of the Greeks there is no reason and power outside of the forms, outside of the reason-infused body. Everything else is in unreasoned flux or liminality, in wait for forming. In the divinisation process the ritual specialist addresses these fluxed intervals and transforms them into various, reason-mimicking forms, thus forcefully creating a ­homogenous and continuous empty substance as the subverted ‘new version’, with an epidemic-like dynamic, continuing to search for forms indefinitely.

Studying subversion through political anthropology This book is a collaborative effort, and the authors of the volume belong to a series of disciplines, which include political science, sociology, history and even theology. Yet the volume, in the way its questions were posed and its studies were oriented, belongs mostly to the emerging subfield called political anthropology (Horvath and Szakolczai 2018a,b; Szakolczai and ­Thomassen 2019; Thomassen and Wydra 2019), especially as it has been promoted by the journal International Political Anthropology since 2008. The aim is to renew thinking about the contemporary using terms developed by social and cultural anthropologists during their fieldwork, thus moving away from the circular, ideological and apologetic interpretation of the present modern world, using concepts developed inside modernity itself, while at the same time relying on classical philosophical anthropology and even the heredity of the main spiritual traditions of mankind. Concepts central for political anthropology thus understood include imitation, trickster, schismogenesis, mask, gift relations and participation but most centrally liminality. Many of these concepts were prominently used in most of the chapters. Taken together, they offer the following, certainly schematic but hopefully illuminating, account of the way it could have come

Introduction  7 to pass that today all of us in ‘advanced modernity’ live deeply immersed inside submission. At the start, a world based on gift relations and participation was suspended and undermined through a series of successive liminal crisis situations, throwing everybody outside the given. As a consequence, imitative processes suddenly started to proliferate, undermining stable frameworks and reference points. Then, under such conditions, initiative was taken over by trickster figures instituting a trickster logic at the heart of social life. Finally, this eventually led to schismogenic processes that undermined stable communities and cultural entities, setting in motion processes of fragmentation and then a forceful reintegration into artificial unities. The state and the market in such a framework can be understood as primary instruments of such reintegration.

Correlations and consequences: mimicry, liminality, reanimation, the soul, unreality One of the main causes and effects of subversion is mimicry. Such a concern is present in the works of Gabriel Tarde concerning the ‘laws of imitation’ as being foundational for social life and of René Girard on the acquisitive, competitive, violent aspect of mimetic rivalry (Tarde 1969; Girard 2008). Mimicry implies the technical skill of purposeful imitation, when a ‘new version’ is introduced but one that leads to monotonous mimicry or self-­ reproduction and ultimately a fall into immobility. In other words, once mimicry becomes the norm, subversion is taken for granted as ­reality, though a reality inevitably produced by boring and repetitive ­duplications. So, the question is in what ways can a homogenised and standardised ­m imicry break the integrity of the character, sole source of power and motion, and produce subversion? How does the liminal, the lack of movement and deprivation characteristic of the subversive new version produced by mimicry, still enact a phantom movement, pertaining to an appearance without material substance and power on its own? In liminal deprivation nothing can function properly as the entity lost the boundaries that secured its fullness, resulting even in self-harm and self-elimination. This is the kind of ‘ultimate reality’ evoked in our first motto, which is the infinite, so dear and precious for the Marxian framework, in search of a dematerialised definition of matter: ‘in seeking and establishing the infinite in the finite’ (Marx 1983: 263). Bakhtin famously captured this unfinalisability of man in his writings about Rabelais and Dostoevsky while living in the inappropriate, unreal world of communism. For the experience of unreality mentioned earlier, there is a term in social theory that has been long and widely used –‘nihilism’. While mostly ­associated with Nietzsche, it was explored before by Dostoevsky, figures associated with German Romanticism and with the thinking of Kierkegaard. In another terminology, explored by Voegelin and based on the novels of Heimito von Doderer, this is due to a ‘second reality’ that is proliferating a

8  Agnes Horvath et al. grotesque canon through a new, constructed, increasingly virtual order. It is considered by Bakhtin to be a vacuum but a vacuum with special violent aggressivity for world revival. This is clearly visible not only in standard revolutionary rhetoric but also in the idea of ‘creative destruction’, so central for Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship and economic development. Thus, it is not an exaggeration to argue that modernity is fundamentally destructive. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, it is also productive or constructive. And it is so in a very particular manner: in order to function properly, modernity’s dynamism needs the willing contribution and consent, even the enthusiasm, of its subjects for renewing themselves. For this, they need to be ‘hooked’ (the term will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1). It is this eager readiness for a ‘new version’ that was central for Goethe’s Faust. This volume takes up Goethe’s ideas not metaphorically but literally as the central target of modern ideology. Foucault recognised in Discipline and Punish that the modern struggle is over the soul, which Plato characterised as indestructible, i.e. impossible to destroy with any other means but the willing participation of the subject. Self-destruction can lead to reanimation as the ‘void’ and the ‘soul’ share the same substance, which is the air – the rebirth during intervals – as in breathing. In liminality one is incapable of true action, like the ‘Nightwalkers, Magi, Bacchoi, Lenai, and the initiated’, as Heraclitus named the active and passive participators of divination rites (Heraclitus fragm.B14, as in Curd and Graham 2011: 53). All those who cannot act, speak or think properly are as if deprived of breathing, and thus stay in an extinguished condition, being alone and forgotten. Characters in a liminal situation are as if mortified, as if their souls were captured, thus deprived of any power, a negation that only multiplies their longing for some kind of air. Such longing for air by the subverted is the condition for a ‘new’ version’ or ‘sub’-version of their selves; they are eager to accept any alterity that is shown to them. In these circular processes, mimicry – with its dematerialisation and rematerialisation – has a double role in giving and taking away, acts circulating aimlessly inside liminality. Depriving people of a clear breath and reasoning power is indeed the motivating principle behind the purposeful steering of liminality as this is aimed towards acquiring those forces of the soul that are indestructible, linked to the inner power of the soul, which can only be acquired if given up voluntarily under the confusing conditions of permanent liminality. These pneumatic energies are the main targets of divinisation and technology, and in two senses. One is the pneuma of the soul – this is linked to the living body itself. The other is the pneuma of the air – which does not contain the body but is as energetic as the first one, though without its reasoning form. As our second motto shows, this energy is a ‘condition’ or ‘situation’ that has a significantly dynamic effect. Such an effect could not have been attained if there were no connections between the soul and its externality: the air, the main target of divination.

Introduction  9

Chapter contents This collection on divinisation and technology has three aims. The first is to examine why our social and political world is dominated by subversion; the second is to examine how it is that we became docile bodies before ­political powers; and the third is to examine how it is that our tradition of inner power ended up being misused into universalised impersonal schemes. In divination and technology, characters are always in the process of becoming someone ‘else’, their reality being ruled out altogether through their infinite transformation and transition into new existences. Enthusiasts, such as Plotinus and Leibniz, advocated ceaseless metamorphosis and unification of universals. In the end, the schismatic ­philosophers Kant, Hegel and Durkheim did not yield any substantive insight. They simply promoted the profusion of new versions of existence and ­burdened their readers with the obligation to throw themselves into the treadmill of transformation. The book argues that divinisation and technology together advance a subversive logic that profits from the blending of liminal intervals. Our objective is to examine, jointly, several key aspects of such liminal modalities of subversion. Agnes Horvath, in the first chapter, deals with some methodological themes concerning the study of subversion, focussing on two central questions: in what ways can subversion be produced by retarding an effect of power, and how does this deficiency cause sterility in the subjects involved in the process? The central issue is how this can be done in a way that still constitutes a certain dynamism but no longer real power as it actually has fallen into sterility. In subversion nothing functions properly, so its effects are anxiety, depression and self-harm. Sterility is a falsity, something unreal; yet it is alive and around us, being even invasive; it exists but exists outside ponderability. Technology is false, either because it itself is unreal or because the impression derived through technology is erratic. In a similar way, divination also produces sterility, lagging behind power and considered awkward. Still, it is an error with a colossal magnetic dynamism, as this chapter intends to show through historical examples. Concerning the impact of the connections between technology and subversion on the rise of the modern mindset, technology is touted typi­ ilbert cally as an agent of social dynamism, as is discussed in Chapter 2, G ­Germain’s chapter, where technical progress is said to perpetuate a culture of creative destruction by subverting established practices in ways that enhance the dynamic of control to the ultimate benefit of humankind. What remains largely unquestioned with this popular reading of technological advance is the set of assumptions that sustain the world view upon which the technological project is grounded. First analysed in Germain’s Thinking about Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality, he continues in his chapter to question whether the ethic of control that

10  Agnes Horvath et al. informs the progressive reordering of reality is aligned with the order of things in a manner that permits the realisation of the technological ideal of total mastery. Germain concludes that by misreading the ‘reality problematic’ the technological world view sets up the conditions that lead to the undermining of the ethic of control. Employing Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of technology as a guide, he shows how the modern project to humanise reality is itself subverted by a dynamic of greater force. In an ironic twist we realise that by working to have the world conform to our designs for it, we simultaneously gain a heightened awareness of the ways the world eludes domination. In Chapter 3 Camil Francisc Roman shows how the experience of the ‘modern’ emerged by substituting the Christian ethos of life with the ethos of the void as the logic of formless subversion. Key to this development was the multiplication of the ‘derivative self’, whose locomotive energy is ‘­self-interest’ or the insatiable desire for self-aggrandisement through the absorption of the void into the inner self. Exploring the links between faith, reason, form and participatory ontology, this chapter illustrates how this process of divinising the void can be traced back to the split between reason and faith effected by the rise of modern philosophy. The discussion then moves on to the rise of modern politics by looking at the French revolution as a perpetual ritual passage, providing the frame for a state of permanent transition and the political consecration of the derivative self. The void becomes at this point symbolised and replicated through modern democracy’s empty place of power and its formless, limitless sacred. However, while the modern as void is concealed by the mimicry of technological construction replacing natural form, it is also to a degree annihilated by the failed sacrifice of the Christian ethos of life. In Chapter 4 Federica Montagni gives a Bakhtinian interpretation of the world of Pieter Brue gel the Elder as a ‘stage of follies’, a perspective central for understanding Renaissance culture and northern humanism. This vision brought the image of a subverted upside-down reality into the political and religious discourses of the 16th century. The chapter analyses the problematic, ‘estranged’ vision, embodied by the subverted fool who spreads out of the emerging mercantile society of Antwerp, home place of the first stock market. The depiction of atomised crowds and the recurring theme of folly in Bruegel’s paintings are studied as the expression of a subverted vision from the ‘outside’. His illusory ‘objectivity’ gave to the fool a predominant role on public stages in squares and markets, relying on his ability of ‘speaking the truth’. Thus, during the celebration of the Feast of Fools, the sacrificial figure of the Lord of Misrule underwent a process of divinisation from the victim to the saviour. Tom Boland’s fifth chapter is about the contemporary proliferation of subversion and critique, exemplified through a digital ethnography of feminist and anti-feminist strands of social media platforms. He shows that these liminal spaces have no limits to subversion or critique; rather, each

Introduction  11 accusation, counter-critique and satire imitatively provokes the escalation of a schism. Drawing on anthropological theories of liminality, schismogenesis, trickster and alchemy, his chapter explores the experience, language and discursive turns of subversion, particularly how negativity, suffering and illusion are emphasised. As critique is infinite, and subversion is subverted, any attempt to rethink critique or subversion, or any ‘critique of critique’, is a dead end. Therefore, this chapter concludes by suggesting that it has become necessary to understand – and even to forgive – critique and subversion as products of a liminal void. Harald Wydra, in Chapter 6, explores the hypothesis that subversion by revolutionary power can offer opportunities for conversion as an existential attitude. Engaging with central aspects of the thought of Czech dissident Václav Havel and the idea of self-defence (samoobrona) of Polish dissidence, the main proposition is that obligations of the soul in pursuit of life in truth can be political ends in the making. Drawing further connections between Mohandas Gandhi’s ideas about truth-force and Heinrich Popitz’s idea of internal power as the need for yardsticks of certainty the chapter shows how liminal conditions can become existential challenges that give meaning to the withdrawal from a social life structured by the correct line of communist doctrine, the schismatic split of people’s minds and the systematic de-humanisation of social relations. Dissidence recognised that evil must be measured by some good, which could satisfy people’s need for yardsticks of certainty and the restoration of a sense of reality. The crucial point is that whilst conversion was not a political strategy driven by an ideology or a project of social engineering, its anti-political spirit became a powerful threat to communism. John O’Brien’s seventh chapter investigates the manner in which public health policy targeting alcohol and other psychoactive substances can have a subversive effect by undermining culturally rooted world views. Alcohol is a major public health concern, and due to the interdependence of risk involved in harmful drinking, a new paternalism has emerged, in the shape of the public health model, aimed at restricting the overall availability and consumption of alcohol. This represents a shift from the traditional focus on proximate risk factors to an attempt at introducing external, formal controls on drinking behaviour. This carries risks, however, as it can lead to the subversion of lifeworlds, which enshrine customs of how to drink virtuously in terms of with whom, when, where and how one should drink. Anthropological research on non-Western societies has shown that these have a eudaimonian concept of drinking based on a sense of proportion which has been preserved to an extent in Mediterranean societies. Central here are the concepts of drug, set and setting for explaining the importance of interpretive frames for whether the outcomes of alcohol use will be constructive or destructive. In contrast, Enlightenment thinking crystallised in the public health model seeks to achieve progress by expanding health but ends up disrupting and fragmenting the world views by problematising

12  Agnes Horvath et al. previously settled forms of conduct through processes of subjectification and biopower. It imposes impersonal, universal, detached rules by replacing principles of virtue and interpretive schemes enshrined in world views with abstract systems. Paul Tyson, in Chapter 8, uses theological categories to analyse the pursuit of financial gain as an aim of high merit in its own right. Presented as ‘mammon’, this pursuit is a powerful governing principle within global capitalism and its consumer societies, and it often functions as a unifying centre of common worship in the prevailing global economic order. The manner in which mammon subverts real value, real people, real immanence and real transcendence are key features of how it operates. The argument of this chapter is that abstract numerical fictions and merely manipulative instrumental power are intrinsic to mammon; here shadows of reality are taken as sociologically and materially real. This chapter argues that the metaphysical and doxological assumptions of modernity need to be questioned if the lifeworld that revolves around mammon is to be critiqued. In this context, theology has something significant to offer as a first-order subversion of the ‘reality’ of mammon and hence of the ‘necessities’ of the prevailing norms of the global economic order. Finally, in Chapter 9, and continuing with the focus on the economic order, Arpad Szakolczai argues that in our days, instead of subversion being reduced to secret plotting for the violent undermining of established powers and authorities, all of us in the advanced, democratic world live inside subversion. In order to explore how such a situation could have emerged, the chapter starts from similar diagnoses by Goethe and ­Dostoevsky, and then introduces a series of concepts from political anthropology, like trickster, imitation and liminality, to analyse the processes resulting in subversion. Centring on the modern economy as a basic modality of subversion, it argues that we do not live inside a market economy that developed gradually out of small-scale exchanges but rather that this economy should be conceived as a fairground that has become permanent. The chapter evokes three historical moments and related trickster figures, focussing on their game with our memory; attacking past, present and future; and contributing greatly to the permanentisation of liminality. It finishes by presenting four concepts, utility, marginalism, interest and opportunity cost, which illustrate the trickster terminology of modern economics. In closing, the contributors to this volume wish to stress that divinisation and technology animate the poisoning dynamic of subversion, with its unnatural weakening of the guiding force of life. Was it not Goethe who said that ‘Is not nature in man’s heart’? It is our opinion that divinisation and technology go beyond nature in their association with unprincipled transformative forces yielding mere novelty for the sake of ‘new versions’, and thus stealing our heart.

Introduction  13

Bibliography Aristotle (1934) Physics, London: Heinemann. Aristotle (1975) On the Soul / Parva naturalia/ On Breath, London: Heinemann. Burnet, John (1930) Early Greek Philosophy, London: A. & C. Black. Germain, Gilbert (2017) Thinking about Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Girard, René (2008) Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, London: Continuum. Hippocrates (1923) Hippocrates, London: Heinemann. Horvath, Agnes (2013) Modernism and Charisma, London: Palgrave. Horvath, Agnes and Arpad, Szakolczai (2018a) Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, London: Routledge. ——— (2018b) ‘Political Anthropology’, in S. Turner and Outhwaite (eds) Sage Handbook of Political Sociology, London: Sage. Kirk, Geoffrey S. and John E. Raven (1963) The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl (1983) Mathematical Manuscripts, London: New Park Publications. Patricia, Curd and Daniel W. Graham (eds.) (2011) The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Szakolczai, Arpad and Bjørn Thomassen (2019) From Anthropology to Social ­T heory: Rethinking the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarde, Gabriel (1969) On Communication and Social Influence, Terry N. Clark (ed), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Thomassen, Bjørn and Harald Wydra (eds.) (2019) Handbook of Political Anthropology, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar. Tocqueville, Alexis de (2010) Democracy in America, Historical-Critical Edition of ‘De la démocratie en Amérique’, A Bilingual French-English Edition, Vol. 1, ­Eduardo Nolla (ed), transl. by James T. Schleifer, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

1 Stepping into sterility Divinisation and technology Agnes Horvath

Introduction let us keep the Sibyl under lock. Cicero, On Divination, II. §112 On the walls of Florence, where the author lives, a particular, recurring ­algebraic graffiti appeared on the days of the ‘marriage for all’ election. It read ‘1+1=1’, an intentional numerical mistake. In subverting the meaning of ‘1’ to nil, the intention of the graffiti emitters was probably to call attention, not to give credence, to senseless falsities and fictitious intentions. Now, the graffiti artist is challenging one to interpret the result of the operation not as an addition but a subversion of its mathematical value. The second ‘1’ is meant to be seen as transforming the operation from addition to subversion. It undoes the value of the operation itself: it is not an addition, a plus, but a gap, an error, a steresis (Greek, meaning ‘deprivation, loss, confiscation’; see Aristotle, Physics, 213b–214a).1 The result is an error but an error with overwhelming waves inviting for submission to false reasoning, for changing the very value of addition, and so initiating a cycle of always being tuned or turned on, being always in excitement but never arriving. Why is it that the number ‘1’ is unable to consummate the process of change? Why is it that it cannot arrive at the final limit of its move? Why is it blocked in its passing from its starting point to its goal, if not to preserve its cyclical divisibility, its potential for producing multiple ‘meanings’, even multitudes? However, at such time nullification means subversion, when meaning is slipping away. Clearly, the destroyed properties have to do with those practices which affect the same lethal transformations in one way or another. One of them is divinisation, the other, closely connected, is technology. They are connected in terms of property machinations. Perhaps the clearest account of this matter is given by Cicero, who argues that the unity with the divine is harmful. Cicero remarked about this point when speaking of Roman divination practices as mercenary activities in his Divination book (II. §85). We argue that when divinisers insinuate cosmic pretensions, they

Divinisation and technology  15 subvert themselves to the void that they are manufacturing for ­themselves – like a technological enterprise give and take. Their union with vacuity is itself a dynamical property (Atwood, as in Principe and Newman 2006: 390), which they then apply on their material by performing subversion that concludes in infinite division. Visibly there is a frightfully strange activity that is taking place in divinisation, by subverting properties. Sibyls are not the source of authority, according to Cicero. Rather, they encourage errors. But this untimely awkwardness is exactly their aim and target, ‘if the body is growing or expanding at every point and can only do so where there is vacuity to grow or expand into’, as Aristotle explained the deadly effect of the nil as unlimited, untimely immaturity; or the deprivation of form that can be divided, through division by the void, as many times as one wishes (Aristotle, Physics, 214b). Nil is sterility, not yet born into forming a substance and character, so it belongs to the womb, to the enigmatic target of the divinisers to accelerate the matrix2 during their union with the divine.3 But what do we know about the mercenary motives4 in this process? For an example, see Chapter 2, about Schumpeterian creative destruction. Creative destruction refers to an absurdum, to an incessant innovation process by which new production units replace outdated ones in a circularity. Here nobody arrives anywhere. Yet it is exactly this circular logic by which something new brings about the demise of whatever existed before, the given, in rolling eternity. This vacuous dynamism is the exact opposite of genuine, ­authoritative power. It is aligned instead with the concept of (­ hy)steresis, withdrawal or lagging behind (see also Chapter 8 on Mammon as ­doxological subversion and Note 15) in a subverted sleepwalker condition. Circularity can store energy only as the movement of those outside the circle, but it is not a power in itself. It is sterile, only having a transversal capacity, to convey the power of others, to pass it from one place into another, as if inside the womb, as it occurs there with the entering of characters and the leaving of the newly born ones. It denotes an eternal displacement, or as Schumpeter formulated ‘destruction’, from one contact to another, never accomplished, never completed. This endless circularity from one thing, person or point to another even could be called a making process, as artificial making is the only thing that does not exist in nature, which is pregiven, with fixed properties. From nature nothing can be added or taken away anymore; ‘we can no longer doubt this reality’ as in his Problems of the Sociology of Knowledge Max Scheler (2014: 72) defined real existence. This is not the case with the unreal as it can have unlimited transitions, unending processes (an ideal totally alien to Plato and Aristotle).5 Placeholders are transitorials like the nil, that can be subdivided as many times as one wishes. Simplifying a little, the nil is not simply a (non-)number, the number of nothingness, but that of imitation (a placeholder). So, in fact there are two imitations colliding in this operation already mentioned: taking somebody’s place (the place of the ‘1’) and the form of equation (it is not a real equation, it only pretends to be). The nil is processing two displacements in transition (about

16  Agnes Horvath imitation, mimesis, ‘mommerie and Mommon’ in divination, see Clark 1997: 21). However, in reality this is one and the same: by imitating the form ‘1’ the nil infiltrates the equation, but by affirming the unity between form and the nil, one also affirms that they are in union. We mentioned steresis as steresis starts the moment when the first (or the second) ceases to be moved by itself and starts to move the next thing in ‘impotent delirium’ (coined by Albert Camus 2012: 261), the transitory move. Similarly while the expression ‘mercenary logic’ may be wanting, it still expresses this delirious, transitory process, implying also the shrewdness of the mind6 that employs imitations in order to draw now one influence, effect or induction, and now another, with the evident consequence of encouraging error (see Chapter 9 on the trickster fixer). And error is sterility, a deficiency in ideas, sentiments or expressions, an insatiable subversion, where the desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves. The shamefaced suffering of the abandoned lover is not so much due to being no longer loved as to knowing that the other partner can and must love again. In the final analysis every man devoured by the overpowering desire to endure and possess wishes that those whom he has loved were either sterile or dead. (Camus 2012: 261) The sterile one is the most dynamic form of desire, but it is also the most horrid,7 in that it can strip its desired one of its very existence, falsifying all their ties and acknowledgments, destroying values and merits, forcing debasement and subversion at any price. This self-destructive vindictiveness never dies out and is never satisfied, which is not surprising as its movement is not linear (towards a goal or target)8 but circular. Circularity is based on impulses, and the more varied and frequent the better, in order to motivate a magnetic transverse spectrum. To be sure, a mercenary logic is beyond the multiplication process as here sensuals9 are influenced by greed or desire for gain; otherwise they could not be continuously stimulated. Greedy sensuals have material value as they are power sources for the sterile dynamism of transitoriness (Horvath 2019). They are the inverted, sensual impulses multiplied by the external wavelength,10 resulting in dynamical strength, such as when the frequency of any electromagnetic wave multiplied by its wavelength equals the speed of light. These questions we touched here for having an idea about the unearthly bones of circling sterility so long as it is the product of ill-will. This circle figuration has a name in English as well: ‘diabolic circle’. Its dynamism immobilises and controls, but as a circle, its form also emphasises a force outside the characters.11 While we are aware that the ‘circle’ as a modern mathematical symbol is a legitimate symbol – the circle has an established role in modern mathematics – still if the circle is able to transform form into subversion, then the circle can and must be excluded from the real realm of mathematics, which is concerned with forms and not with unfinalised ­occurrences. Indeed, the circle, the symbol of the nil, was only accepted and

Divinisation and technology  17 acknowledged inside the subversive activities of various divination practices. The nil was used only by occult, secret practices outside established cultural authorities and had no legitimacy within the realm of mathematics until the 16th century, when it was taken up by science at once. Its success was amazing.

Divinisation The way in which nil, void, zero, or the circularity of annihilating processes ­alter the identity of its subject can be analysed through Cicero’s notion of ‘furor’: since by its means [i.e., divination – A.H.] men may approach very near to the power of gods. And, just as we Romans have done many other things better than the Greeks, so have we excelled them in giving to this most extraordinary gift a name, which we have derived from divi, a word meaning ‘gods’, whereas, according to Plato’s interpretation, they have derived it from furor, a word meaning ‘frenzy’. (Cicero 2014, I: §1) Cicero wrote this ironic passage during the dreadful condition of Roman politics in his lifetime, and his exclusion from Roman politics. At the same time he developed a strong conviction against any divination practices, as the second part of his book on ‘Divination’ shows. Against Stoic beliefs about the benefit of divination and so subversion in the name of the divine, Cicero, while a Stoic, stood for the opposite: nothing could be gained by subversion, only enslaving ourselves to ignorance. Acknowledging that the human soul is derived and drawn from a source exterior to itself, he refuted the possibility of this union. Cicero emphatically reasserted his devotion to divine power at least three times in the short book, but strongly marked himself off from divinisers, first because no such thing as divination exists and second because divinisation and divinisers are utterly inconsistent with respect to the dignity of gods. Finally, because they themselves are not characters, their inner power being subverted, he ‘who has no concern for himself or for others can not impart divination to men’ (II. §41). When the divinisers take into their own characters the void around them, by offering their own body, they purge others as well as themselves in a particular ‘furor’, an emotional state aligned with eagerness, and which perpetuates the physical condition of subversion as violent self-abasement and self-harm. ‘Furor’, as Cicero called it, is not something that eagerness does not contain. Quite the contrary, eager desire is very much part of ‘furor’, including a will for possession and absorption. However, it is not as exclusive as ‘furor’, at least according to Camus, who, we have seen, named it ‘impotent delirium’. In this opus everything wants a character to fill, and every character wants another one to fulfil; thus subversion turns into the furor of circularity. The divinisers as well as the presumed divinised participate in the completeness of the circle of subversion. This is a reductive and bracketing process that cancels resistance, borders and limits.

18  Agnes Horvath This is how technology functions. It aims to transform in a subversive furor everything that moves on earth, everything alive that has a character or a self-movement. Technology is always there to cut, violate, disturb and enter independent reasoning and self-moving beings. Sometimes it incites appetite in order to embrace an exterior force, or simply through extracting the life force of characters, as it is characteristic of masks, an original form of technology.12 The fear of characters of suffering domination at the presence of technology is not something we should take easily, and is closely ­related to warnings made by scholars as diverse as Mumford, ­Heidegger and Gell. Heidegger (1978: 287–319) warned about avoiding the autonomous logic of the advancement of technology, while Gell (1998) called attention to the expressive-emulative essence of technology, connecting it to enchantment and magic. We should add to this a third aspect, the invitation of void into characters.13 How to cajole, the ‘0’ into a union with the ‘1’, into a circular operational process? Is this the question of divination, deeply buried inside technology? The answer is imitation: miming the forms to inspire the nil, or the void, for appetite, for union with the characters.14 Divinisation works according to the same logic, frenzying supernatural forces using mimicry. But subversion is a step further. Man supposedly becomes divine once the divine organisation of the universe has become his own, so there is nothing left than to sublimate this divine content with the help of imitation, which reproduces it, by the transcendental unity of different substances into his body. Since the transcendental as exteriority is universally present in the world, the process of coming to possess it must be through projections of its movements and impulses by miming them. The emission of projections or moving images is a most important step in the process of divinisation, in ‘union or marriages with an otherworldly being’, together with ‘flash’ or ‘light’ epiphanies (see Eliade 1989: 266, 420–421). Emissions will reflect the motions of living beings – and in this way it is possible to stimulate the transcendental to move and act, to bridge a correspondence between the inner and the transcendental worlds. This is the moment to release the transcendental from the form that entrapped its precious content of magnitude and infinity, so and again wavelength has a particular importance in divinisation. This is the way of the divinisation of man, and at the same time the materialisation of the mental images that have not yet existed but came into existence by this very act of union. It also brings about the deformation of characters, relegating them to the world of knowledge (information, communication). This is how both divination and technology work: not in an innocent way as their machinations are not efficient without hooking, without absorbing all those who were lured into the embrace of its arms, as shown by the (hy)steresis symbol, the hook sign ‘Y’. The next sections will first present the nature of this voiding dynamism, which gets such an importance in divinisation and technology. Then, as a second step, the chapter will discuss the question of sterility, or the emptying of characters under subversion.

Divinisation and technology  19

Exterior dynamism and its sterilising effect: the subversive Y Hysteresis is a Greek word meaning shortcoming, deficiency or need. It is rooted in the idea of lagging behind, or being too late, and etymologically rooted in hystera ‘womb’,15 together with ‘hysterical’ – at least, that was the opinion of Hippocrates about the suffocative lagging behind of the womb (Gilman et al. 1993: 3). Hysteresis is a term for electromagnetic circular vibration, first conceptualised by the Cambridge natural scientist J.C. ­Maxwell, whose theory of electromagnetic radiation gave a scientific base for the e­ xistence of an electromagnetic potential between beings. In hysteresis the value of a character lags behind the effects, causing changes in it as, for instance, when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetising force. In his A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865), ­Maxwell brought electrical phenomena within the province of such d ­ ynamism. It is a ‘force’ but a very particular ‘hysteretic’ or ‘steretic’ one as it cannot exist by itself or without mediums, like magnets are becoming magnets by objects drawn to themselves. They are searching mediums as they at once are themselves in steresis in that they are absorbing and causing (now like in a unifying conductor) electric and magnetic phenomena, but they are not able to move by themselves. All types of different kinds of wavelength are the production of this union between the medium and the magnetisers, which for a long time was considered the knowledge of divinisation in oriental religions.16 Wavelength has an external existence, what can be reached and embodied by divinisation, as their nature is absorption. Absorbing the energies of beings by a union with them is the steresis phenomenon, and in this chapter our aim is to demonstrate that the same subversive logic takes place both in technology and in divination or divinisation. Technology and especially its earlier variety, metallurgy, utilise the magnetic properties of metals. When using alternating current, the magnetisation of the metal lags behind the changing flow of the general wavelength. This explains steresis as all characters are like magnets, and their resistance to subversion is something like rearranging themselves in alignment with the new direction of magnetic force. The effect of subversion is like the effect of a trauma or drama that magnetise characters to each other. In a dialogue Plato explained this magnetic effect when each magnetised iron ring has the capacity to take on the charge that holds it, yet the magnetism resides in the magnet, not in the temporarily magnetised rings: just as the Corybantian worshippers do not dance when in their senses, so the lyric poets do not indicate those fine songs in their senses, but when they have started on the melody and rhythm they begin to be frantic, and it is under possession—as the bacchants are possessed, and not in their senses. (Plato, Ion, 534a) No ring is itself the source of the next ring’s attachment to it. This is a union but a union of sterile, suffocating frenzy; creating a subversion that breaks

20  Agnes Horvath up their totality by making new radicals. For the purpose of testing the concept steresis, we can combine the ongoing interest in electromagnetic waves with a few visual representations of steresis from Palaeolithic caves.

Testing steresis in the Palaeolithic A cave often is formed by a dissolution of limestone (there are also other ways). The result is an absence of matter, a hole in the earth, an undermining or collapse of the original matter, with an opening to the surface. This lends it its feminine character, expressed by the Latin word cava, connoting a container or the passive substance of a making, the surrender of something to impulses, eager to be embodied, as if in a sleep: a place of contraction, an unending slipping and collapse. It is an effect similar to fluctuation waves, which produce more open damage when the body is relaxed and the mind is unconscious. Caves radiate energy: they are radioactive hotspots, their magnetism long being measured and acknowledged.17 Producing one entrance into this cavity itself has a double meaning: one is to emphasise the act of dissolution (the authentic cave possessed one entry, the one on the right when facing it), which is an active action, and another passive one, reinforcing the exterior nil, the circular-wavelength-form character of the cave itself. But to produce a ‘Y’ form entrance (see Figure 1.1) must have had

Figure 1.1  T  he ‘Y’ entrance of Font-de-Gaume cave. Photo: Camil Francisc Roman.

Divinisation and technology  21 a special significance, which is the adding of another, blind opening to the existing one, and thus forming the steresis sign. When entering a cave, one is transgressing boundaries. It implies not being in control either of time or space, belonging neither to the dark nor to the light, neither to death nor to life. This subversive experience has been shared by many who were in caves and encountered the presence of a surreality, turbidity, a certain exteriority which is yielding us. It confiscates the most important part of our character: its finitude. Unfinalisability influences the delicate balance of our life, the normal functioning of each cell in our body, their positively and negatively charged elements that keep in harmony on both sides of the cell walls. It is a disruption of the critical balance of nature, disturbing our own electrical impulses, the way they are produced by cellular activity. And with good reason as radiation pressures are the waves of the receptor, the inner dynamism of the matrix,18 which functions to absorb characters and change their attributes: an occupation, even if a rather steretic one. Opening a second gap to a cave is to create a ‘Y’ with a line towards the outside world and a hook towards the cave. The radioactive hotspot of the cave, with its radon concentration, offers a profitable use for manufacturing minds, looking for all possible dimensional intervals catching the cave’s wavelengths. This hook creates steresis, a suffocating womblike existence, with all its attributes of unfinalisability, and even further leading on to the disappearance of the two fundamental essences of life: finite matter and form, together with the principle of how to fill the forms. Producing a ‘Y’ entrance to a cave required relativist thinking. It implied a leap into the void, by invoking the void, affecting the void to take space in them, which was considered as being outside until this precious moment of void making. This recalls ‘1+1=1’, where the second ‘1’ subverts the first ‘1’, takes its place with its own distillation, the annihilating potency of the steresis or error, or gap, yet showing itself as a character, while it has no meaning, being only fake production, not finished but unfinished, not complete as formed but unformed and premature or uterine. The fake is a debasement, directing characters supposedly for their own benefit by all possible means of disguising power, leading them away from their more credible forms as they have been copied in an unscrupulous manner, taking up whatever disguise in order to fool the senses. In this way imitation becomes an adaptation to suit those purposes that were not present in the authentic mindset. How cells grow and reproduce themselves is laid down in nature with the principle of bettering themselves in reaching their forms. But this process is now blocked, only producing different modalities of maladies. Heidegger has given a voice to this danger when he said that the essence of technology is mysterious, lying in the potentially lethal technological process, which already ‘afflicted man in his existence’, denying for him to enter into becoming a principled being (Heidegger 1978: 309). Furthermore, if we give a second look at the image, the two entrances will appear as the two starting points of the ‘upsilon’, before it starts to

22  Agnes Horvath develop into two straight lines, and before the two straight lines are united into one straight line of the cave corridor. Y is the sign of any unknown, unspecified or variable factor in mathematics. The ‘upsilon’ can show vibration; it is known as Pythagoras’ letter, the alchemist Dee’s ‘cosmopolitical sign’, as a symbol of something lagging behind (see again the etymology of ­hysteresis) (Yates 1972: 58; Dee 2003). The upsilon form is used in divinisation, in dowsing to locate the unknown, the retarded, hidden effects, like underground water, or buried metals. (Hy)steresis is a particular condition. It is not rest but rather a damping of characters, their gradual reduction at the middle of their progress, where they start to increase their power to grow out from the womb, and so their appearance at the end of the process, their dispersed energy is reduced. This is like an elastic rubber band, with weights attached to it: when its loading and unloading is done quickly, an internal friction occurs, proportional to the loading, with a steretic lagging behind. The dynamism comes from the friction of the loading. Or a slingshot, that plaything consisting of a Y-shaped stick, with an elastic between the arms; by propelling small stones one can even kill a Goliath. Inside Palaeolithic caves sacred bullroarers were also used with similar effect: a small wooden slat attached to a string that makes a roaring noise when whirled.19 Steresis reveals a transitory dynamism that was dissipated due to internal material friction, when weights attached to it, a movement that produces waves. The simple and evident question is the following: whether it is the weight that moves and produces the dynamism of the instrument, or it is the mover who changes its current flow by instrumentalising its movement by making it closed in the slingshot? Or rather the weight, lagging behind by changing its current flow? A small increase in length causes huge transitory dynamism. It will get longer, continuing to extend, and the dynamism is increasing. This nonlinear dynamism is due to steresis, the retardation of an effect from forcing to enforcing, a kind of circling movement. While electricity is simply the flow of electric charge across a gradient, across the degree of inclination or the rate of ascent or descent, it always implies a rate of change: this is the circle, the curve form of the electric waves. It is known, that the devil’s circle has a ‘0’ or ‘o’ form. There, inside the circle, a wavelength circularity occurs where linearity is dissolved, objects disappear, nothing grows and strange events occur to those who venture inside its encircled boundaries.20 Such barren places are allegedly haunted. They have a power of their own that wants forms to be filled, to be their own, subverting human lives. But the ‘0’ left no successors if not the ‘Y’ sign. The hook sign ‘Y’ has its arms or branches open towards the victims, while its trunk carries the energies taken from the victims towards the machinator. The movement of steresis occupies space and dissolves characters, so that those who invite these waves to take a possession of their own bodily form often become sick, suffocated, as they are bringing impulses (electromagnetic field) inside. From these it appears that we are collecting diabolical signs. However, once again they are just appearances, innocent of interpretation. At C ­ ambridge

Divinisation and technology  23 University, in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, there are goddess figures with ‘upsilon’ marks carved on their necks, indicating divine intensity, a sign of vibration, the transcendental as an exteriority in the realm of forms, in the linearity of power and movement, where each successive change must always be along a definite line, though it might be along any one of the possible lines, including the direct opposite of the one it succeeds.21 The status of the goddess as a transcendental figure with the Y signs indicates how much and how far we can reach the void here through the electromagnetic signs and our approach to it by divination. Indeed, both divination and technology supply an identical answer: by subversion (Figure 1.2). The image shows duplicated bison, each an exact copy of the other. They correspond to each other as running out of a cleavage on the cave wall, their legs curiously crossed in a retardation effect of the ‘Y’. The bison form the aforementioned slingshot form, which is the reductive steresis, opened towards the spectator. Steresis is a nonlinear dynamics of the infinite (this explains its mercenary potentials; it could be divided without limit) inside the matrix itself. Indeed, steresis (hidden, secret, womblike appearance) by itself does not fit the category of a movement (interchanging qualities, quantity or place between two positively indicated terms, the homology). Quite on the contrary, it is a subversive, absorbing stage: for its dynamism it needs

Figure 1.2  Cross-legged double ‘Y’ bison, duplicated movement: Grotte de Lascaux (Dordogne). The running bison are each other’s mirror images. Image: ‘Panneau des bisons adossées’ © Cliché N. Aujoulat – Centre National de Préhistoire – MCC.

24  Agnes Horvath

Figure 1.3  Missing Movement: Circular Dynamism – Herd of Reindeer engraved on the wing bone of an eagle, from La Grotte de la Mairie, Teyjat (­Dordogne). Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

matters and forms to be absorbed. It is represented by the ‘Y’ sign which opens its two arms towards the outside and, like a fungus infection, it slowly infiltrates everything (Figure 1.3). This image captures the movement of reindeer: their motion in one body is split into two, opened towards us. Maybe this is the first visual interpretation of the Einsteinian postulate, that ‘[a]ll bodies are elastically deformed and alter their volume with changes in temperature’ (Einstein 2001: 146), or that bodies themselves, and all the things revealed to us, are momentarily mutable. Yet they remain the same: the reindeer retained their reindeer form after their flight as if in a circle. They run a wavelength, not for its own sake, but to enable the magnetic force to be manifest. Like a divining fork in divination, they are locked in the hook of a movement, in order to induce their reindeer bodies to move beyond them. Their sources of power are subverted, directed to an external power, out of their borders; their dematerialised physical images relegate them to steresis. How can there be any enduring identity at all? Unlike in steresis in linear movement the character is given, the senses function properly, moving along a set track at a certain rate. All the changes have positively indicated terms, and all transitions occur between specific states or opposites in nature. According to Euclidean reasoning, time and space are not abstractions, and neither are they floating in the flux, but they have a concrete significance in one’s life and in reality, and could not be a different thing from one moment to another, while of course their actual states could be.

Wavelength in steresis: the nonlinear dynamism In steresis, the characters cease to be moved by themselves but are moved by an exterior dynamism, imparting a process of replacing their own movement with an exterior one, as shown by Camillo’s ‘Memory Theatre’, as described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memory (Yates 1976), or the Villa Farnese in Caprarola (Lazio, Italy) with its i camminamenti di ronda (circular walks), or the Ancient Greek peripteros style temples, where a larger circle surrounded

Divinisation and technology  25 the central circle, which contained the steresis or immobility, but at the same time allowed the ‘circular walkers’ pass round the central place. This central place holds many meanings. It either served as a sanctuary, with its columns ‘standing around’ – literally as ‘per-i-stasis’ is from the Greek word stasis ‘standing still’. It may also refer to a state of stasis, the universe (cosmos) or both, in which all impulses are uniting, as in a receptacle, one absorbing the other. It recalls the perception of the German political theorist, H ­ einrich Popitz, about the receptor or container nature of technical artefacts that serve no purpose beyond the production of other artefacts (Popitz 2017: 122–123). The columns are defensive and protective at the same time. This indicates the role they play in the functioning of the centre as a uterus, the womb receptor of all thinking, feeling, intentions, deeds and consequences. This static, unmoved, icebox character is Thucydides’ description of stasis, the symptomatic paralysis of the political community, when infectivity and a lack of action occur (Thucydides 2013: 210–213). At any rate peristasis, this womblike, immobile centre-receptacle-cave-form, is the basis of every generation, heightening the quality of entering and departing characters, as laid down in nature (also called the matrix), a uniform, unitary possession by its own that becomes active by absorbing the previous movers. It has no power on its own but gains power by the characters entering and departing it. In the peripteros example, from the movement of the priests in the room, their emotions and activities, such as walking, reading and sacrificing, the central receptor gains power for production. Their activities are in continuous movement, keeping the peristasis on the move. They are hardly exhausted, because their power is transmitted with intensity to each successive link. Similarly, in Camillo’s ‘Theatre of Memory’ the same transitive function is at work, just as in the 16th century Villa Farnese mentioned earlier, which was designed according to the divination qualities of the numbers 3, 5, 5, as manifest with a pentagonal main building inside three embracing walls with five towers each on the outside fortification. According to my understanding this castle was inspired by the cubic traiphum cosmology, of great significance in astrology and alchemy, for the elevation and stimulation of the progression of gradients. Most importantly, this was accomplished by walking, as in peristasis, along the corridors in a circle: i camminamenti di ronda. We would argue that this arrangement and mechanism captures a defining characteristic of subversion. The transferring process depends heavily on the characters: they never get born, are imprisoned into the suffocating incubator womb forever. What is more, subversion by definition is a movement to annihilate the characters, and so its dynamism is exhausted and does not last forever. Characters and subversion, though, are an unequal pair; and there is no doubt who is the loser. The intensity and dynamics of subversion depend on the characters, even when the originators have ceased to cause the motion, not offering themselves anymore to the circular dynamism that still persists. Yet it is precisely the wavelength of the steresis that moves and keeps moving into a seeming eternity.

26  Agnes Horvath

Manifestation of subversion in production: uterine progress What mystery lies at the heart of subversion? Nothing or, better to say, the nothingness of continuous subversion, the destruction of characters (see Chapter 2), the uterine progress, the multiplication of unformed and dark matter. The main effects of subversion are dissolution, absorption and their continuous production of shadow uterine existences, in the embrace of the hook of the ‘Y’. The i camminamenti di ronda is a circular walk that does not lead anywhere. It lacks the process or progress of walking because it is not going ahead or forward. In other words, it is in steresis, with an infinite, cosmological orientation recalling divination: what was impossible for reality transformed into possibility by divinisation, because anything finite cannot cause a motion that will occupy an unlimited time. The finite, the characteristic and articulated form, exists only in delimited time and space. This is the meaning of characters, which can remain one and same over an extended period of time, except, of course, if steresis occurs, that culminates in the collapse of characters: for it is something that has never been named and is impossible to name, which becomes manifest at such moments as liminality. This is mediated by uterine subverts, those who were already captured by the transformation machinery, who motivate responses, inferences or interpretations. They have no power in themselves; they draw energy from the subverted, the ill will to be similar with ‘1’, the resentment that ‘wants the labour of the bees’, 22 by driving off the ‘1’ not only mimetically. They produce mimetic pairs of the original character, giving a new synthetic construction above it, a next layer on the top of the imitated. These imitations first appeared on cave walls in prehistory as paintings and incisions, and as shown in Figure 1.1, even by hollowing out from the hollowed cave the double zeros as receptacles in the form of the cave entrance, the imitation of the creative, womb/matrix meaning of the cave-cavity. A single opening to the cave is already a steresis, imitating and so duplicating the cave’s essential receptacle meaning, but two openings reveal the excess described by the example of ‘1+1=1’. Such a subversive act brings shapelessness and formlessness in the form of steresis. Subversion is a callous place – it does not move by itself, it has no position and so no opposition but a coming into being of something with the union. It is this aspect that makes the unchangeable, the non-existent into a kind of existent, a being of its own, as also Plato noticed it in the Sophist, and so dependent on our life as it gains life only through the union with solidity. In it there is a ‘to be’ in a state of unchanging. So how can such a state of nothing actually ‘be’? This combination of technology with divinisation includes a puzzle – a zero set, an unknown element which is its unchanging and unlimited ­nature – which renders it impossible to reach the goal, to arrive or to be mature, that

Divinisation and technology  27 forces us into primitivity and passivity, as Sombart so finely described in his ‘The influence of technological invention’ (Sombart 2001: 229–247). It is sterile, though alive! It is missing the endpoint of every move, the target of every locomotion, which is the arrival, the reaching of a sense, the fulfilling of a desire. What is missing is the bringing of love to satisfaction, to fulfil it by conceiving a new life. Sterility means having no end, no accomplishment, just a dead end in the number zero. The zero is sterile, empty and without any use for life; by this union with technology, we became subverted to an increasingly independent and expanding sterility.

Conclusion Divinisation developed a technology for subverting the individual, a way to transforming it into an ever transforming, evolutive character. Despite intermittent intellectual pressure from classical Greek and Roman thinkers, its logic maintained its strength until complete occupation of the mode of thinking represented above by Einstein. Here this little transformative ‘0’ sign is highly significant, for its circle conveys the catching, holding and entrapping of characters. It is the positional number, which subverts numerical characters, now, for our use and utility. With ‘0’ we move into subversive territory, into a new technological world – the world of the penetration and dissolution of all solids, the world which is independent from matter and space – into the Einsteinian manifestation of an inertial universe (Einstein 2001). The point is to preserve numbers, space, time and linear movement, while identifying the problem of steresis: giving validity and significance for inertia. Hence Einstein’s approach is a steresis of movement, the electromagnetic domain that developed from transitoriness. However, there is only one definition of forms: whether it is capable of internally driven linear movement or not. But Einstein’s idea is meaning or expressing nulla as characters no longer have significance in it. Subversion is at work now; as in ‘1+1=1’ there is nothing at all – no movement, no results, no addition, no creativity, no body and no soul; it gives up ponderability in order to replace it by the totality of privation, in line with the indication contained in the ‘Y’ sign, the annihilation of the characters embraced in its arms. Steresis is the gap, something which is not, the nothing, but with a backward, capturing movement. A sterile society is the opposite of a healthy one, with blind corridors; a social responsibility founded on the maxim of error, where there are no precise laws, no idea concerning sharply and stably defined bounding surfaces of forms. Instead, characters are becoming ensnared. This is the way we have come to conceive of the world, and so gained the representation or reflection of the universe as a place of relativity. Where there is nothing as ruling conduct, the nothing will rule. Only sterility has validity in this upside down turned framework, frenzied by divinisation and merchandised technologically.

28  Agnes Horvath Steresis is a circularity as it finalises something about nothing, such as in our case of ‘0’ making, where the ‘1+1=1’ alters the meaning of ‘1’, making it something that it is not, so this statement or operation is false. Steresis lags behind existence. It is the unreal one that is not ‘1’ but is imitating ‘1’. This intentional error may even have meaning in some kind of substitute notation, replacing the ‘1’ with the ‘0’. But how can something bring the same result by addition, if not by taking away the quality of the operation? Addition is the process of uniting numbers into a sum, to add, to give, so the result of adding is always something more, except for addition with the number ‘0’. This particular algebra with nil entities is open for many interpretations, and this chapter offered one of them, arguing that steresis, like sterility, is the appetite for possession, to such a point that it can consume even the loved one itself. Sterility is a hysterical state, lacking power and action, fertility and productiveness; it is a retarded state of barrenness, where actions are fruitless and all intentions are in vain.

Notes 1 The term ‘steresis’ plays a major role in the thinking of Heidegger (1995) and ­Agamben (2014), who follow a reading of Aristotle close to the actuality-­ potentiality distinction of Aquinas, revived in Hegel’s focus on potentiality. The reading offered in this paper, as it will become evident, is quite different as the paper does not accept the idea that deprivation is an almost necessary precondition for dynamism and change. Such an idea is rather equivalent to an apology of forced liminality. 2 Matrix or as it was called by Plato the receptacle, the gestation of matter: ‘which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things that have birth’ (Plato, Timaeus 52b). 3 The alarming idea that the nil belongs to the womb is supported by its character in that it is incapable of motion on its own, is incapable of differentiation; it is not determined and not located of its own; it has no independent value. 4 Mercenary motives are those which take advantage of others by dissecting their existence, stripping them of their essence and then refashioning them for the sake of their advantage. 5 The unreal is unlimited, or in liminality, where there is vacancy, without top, bottom or middle, and there are undifferentiated directions up and down. This is why Aristotle considered this stage as a mere shortage (Aristotle, Physics, 215a) 6 The shrewdness of mind is marked by cunning practices and trickery as the lack of natural resources, the incapacity of differentiation and the sterility of existence result in a colossal appetite for the property of others. It needs carriers, which they gain by using tricky analogies to draw surprising interferences about subverting meanings and reasons. 7 Sterility is horrid as it has no inner power, and it is unable to move by itself, unless carried by others. It must therefore either be in stasis or continue its dynamism by subverting all solids, and then posing as power. 8 It is this linear movement that is abusively incorporated in the idea of linear evolutionary progress.

Divinisation and technology  29 9 The word ‘sensual’ designates a certain unity of feeling, sensation (as sense ­p erception), but also a mental operation as captured in terms like ‘sense of judgment’. Such a unity was still present in the way Pascal used ‘sentiment’ in French, but the English meaning since has been reduced to the ‘soft’ sense of ‘feeling’. 10 Wavelength is a vibration travelling through the air, taken up by the Stoics first, then by quantum mechanics. But Pythagoras’ strings example, when wave patterns formed throughout the matter is also similar. It is also captured in the Greek letter lambda. 11 By character we mean the inner essence of the principled one, corresponding to the Greek emphasis on the ethos of the genuine and cheerful; credulous; the passionate, who pays homage to beauty; well developed in mind and spirit, who live unconscious yet in order with goodness. 12 See also the stone masks discovered at PPNA Jericho. Beholding these masks is comparable to watching a horror movie. 13 For further details, see Horvath and Szakolczai (2018, Chapter 5). 14 See also Norbu and Turnbull (1972: 166) about sensuals being incited by sexual energy or narcotic stimulation, consisting of sound ‘waves’. Of these, only those of a certain length are audible to the human ear. Matter is only visible or tangible within a certain range of wavelengths. 15 Sterésis and hysterésis are not connected etymologically. Sterésis, ‘deprivation, loss, confiscation, negation’, is rooted in IE *ster, ‘steal, rob’, while hysterésis, ‘shortcoming, deficiency, need, lack’, is rooted in IE *ud-tero, ‘womb’. Their derivation is thus quite different: ud-tero became hystera and thus hysteraios, ‘following, next, sequel’, and similar words, meaning a succession of offspring from the same womb, but then ‘coming after’ gained the connotation of coming late, too late, thus of inferior quality. Hysteresis is present in Christian ecclesiastical writings, where it is contrasted with gift-abundance, while the similar term hysteréma means lack of faith or power or in general needs. The meaning of sterésis is simpler on a first look; however, *ster is one of the most prolific Indo-­European roots, also standing for ‘solid, fixed’ and ‘infertile’, the three roots being considered separate. These roots gave rise to a number of separate words, like the latter steiros, ‘sterile, barren’, and the former to stereos, ‘firm, solid’, but these occasionally became again joined, like the word steriphos having two meanings: ‘sterile, barren’, derived from steiros, and ‘firm, solid’, derived from stereos. In fact, Aristotle is uniquely credited in making such a connection by extending the barrenness of infertility to fixity, which might have contributed to his giving such a huge emphasis, in his Metaphysics, to the word sterésis, present in Plato only in Laws, and without any emphasis. Thus, as the two words already in ancient Greek ‘sounded’ quite similar, their meanings were brought close (‘lack, need’ and ‘deprivation, loss’ are quite similar ideas), and this can be reasonably extended, as this paper tries to do, following on Heidegger’s (1995: 91–98) reading of steresis as ‘withdrawal’. 16 Divinisation was not known for the Greeks until Hellenism. 17 See the radon level and the radiation accumulation doses in caves. 18 See again Horvath and Szakolczai (2018), Chapter 1. 19 This is also similar to the effects produced by pulling marionettes on strings; see especially the essay of Heinrich von Kleist ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, from 1810. 20 It recalls the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a film also centrally focussing on the ambivalence of desire as Hobbesian appetite.

30  Agnes Horvath 21 See linear change, as coined by Aristotle, Physics, 226a1; the term used is hystera, ‘following’, ‘next’, ‘sequel’, a derivative of the ‘womb’, a clear allusion to ‘linear transformation’. 22 Hesiod used this example as men are angry with a man who lives idle, for in nature he is like the stingless drones who waste the labour of the bees, eating without working; but let it be your care to order your work properly, that in the right season your barns may be full of victual. Through work men grow rich in flocks and substance, and working they are much better loved. (Hesiod 2006: 305)

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (2014) ‘The Power of Thought’, Critical Inquiry 40, 2: 480–491. Aristotle (2014) Physics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Camus, Albert (2012) The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, New York: Doubleday. Cicero, Marcus T. (2014) On Old Age / On Friendship / On Divination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clark, Stuart (1997) Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dee, John (2003) Monas Hieroglyphica, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. Einstein, Albert (2001) Relativity: The Special and General Theory, London: Routledge. Eliade, Mircea (1989) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, London: Penguin. Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gilman, Sander L., King, Helen, Porter, Roy, Rousseau, G. S., and Showalter, Elaine (eds.) (1993) Hysteria Beyond Freud, Berkeley: University of California Press. Heidegger, Martin (1978) Basic Writings from ‘Being and time’ (1927) to ‘The task of thinking’ (1964), London: Routledge. ——— (1995) Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hesiod (2006) Theogony / Works and Days / Testimonia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horvath, Agnes (2019) ‘Walling Europe: The Perverted Linear Transformation’, in A. Horvath, M. Bența, and J. Davison (eds) Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, London: Routledge. Horvath, Agnes and Szakolczai, Arpad (2018) Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, London: Routledge. Norbu, Thubten Jigme and Turnbull, Colin (1972) Tibet, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Popitz, Heinrich (2017) Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence, New York: Columbia University Press. Plato, (1968) Plato in twelve volumes, London: Heinemann. Principe, Philippe and Newman, William (2006) ‘Some Problems with the ­H istoriography of Alchemy’, in W. Newman and A. Grafton (eds) Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Scheler, Max (2014) Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, London: Routledge.

Divinisation and technology  31 Sombart, Werner (2001) Economic Life in the Modern Age, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Thucydides (2013) The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yates, Frances (1964) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge. ——— (1972) The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge. ——— (1976) The Art of Memory, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

2 Technology and the subversion of control Gilbert Germain

Introduction To subvert is to undermine or thwart an established center of power and authority.1 Political revolutions subvert established regimes. Intellectual subversives help dislodge entrenched thought paradigms. Cultural revolutions effectively delegitimate extant ethical practices and standards. In what sense, then, if any, can technology be thought subversive? On one level, the answer is self-evident: Technology connotes novelty and the introduction of novelty into the world necessarily holds the power to trigger disruptive or ­destabilizing effects. Consider as an example the invention of the remote control. As James Walker and Robert Bellamy argue, this relatively simple device did not merely advance the speed and ease with which channels can be accessed but more importantly altered the established ‘operational parameters’ (Walker and Bellamy 1997: 1) of the television industry. The move from channel turning to channel surfing—an incremental advance in the deployment of a technical function—had enormous ramifications for what it meant to watch television, a consequence we have seen repeatedly since in numerous other realms of contemporary consumer culture. The business buzzword ‘creative destruction’2 sums up nicely the thinking that sees technology as a revolutionary force aligned with powers of wealth creation. Subversion is good and, arguably, the age of technology excels over past eras in its capacity to harness and direct the powers of destabilization to further the ostensible betterment of humankind. The popular reading of technology as a disruptive force for the good of society is, if not entirely misleading, myopic in the extreme. By identifying technology with technologies—with tools and their effects—attention is drawn away from a critical analysis of the broader intellectual framework within which the technological quest for power gains its legitimacy. I take it as axiomatic that the ‘world’ we make for ourselves through our labors reflects in its constitution the dominant worldview of its creators. In other words, how we humanize the world, how and to what extent we make it our own, reflects a generally accepted understanding of the meaning of things.3 To take one example, how a civilization regards the question of fate

Technology and the subversion of control  33 or fortune affects the extent to which that civilization commits ­resources to altering the course of worldly events. Our age, the modern era, is characterized by its activist stance. To the extent that the modern project has as its end the reordering of nature, it is aligned with the technological ­worldview. In George Grant’s words, technology is modernity’s ontology (Grant 1986: 32). Following the lead of Martin Heidegger, Grant and others of ­similar ­persuasion argue that technology is understood best as the way reality shows itself to us today: Our age is defined by the particular manner in which reality’s being is experienced.4 This ontological approach to the question of technology holds that something first must pertain to give us sanction to ‘act into nature’ in a way that seeks domination over the Earth, and ourselves as earthly creatures.5 This preconditional ‘something’ is ideational: We act technologically, we are a toolmaking civilization, because we think technologically or, better yet, ­because we interpret the world’s meaning along technological lines. One of the most perspicacious interpreters of what it means to think technologically is the French social theorist, Jean Baudrillard. In having something important to say about what it means to interpret reality through a technological lens, Baudrillard simultaneously illuminates what it means to think critically about technology. Better than any recent thinker, I ­submit, and to the point of this chapter, his reading of the contemporary ­cultural scene helps us understand the technological question in the ­context of the subversion of control. The novelty of Baudrillard’s analysis rests with the proposition that as powerful a force as technology aims to be—a ­revolutionary power that aspires to absolute mastery—our technological ambitions are checked by a force of even greater subversive power: the truly cosmic or ontological principle Baudrillard calls la mal or evil.6 I argue here that subversion, to be appreciated properly as a category of thought and a modality of dynamism, needs to be conceived anew because its irruption today takes specific form in the context of a technological order of increasingly global scope. The common understanding that highlights the transformational powers of technology, the kind of insight that focuses on how particular technological advances open new windows of ­possibility, is framed to overlook the force that works against the imposition of ‘good ­order’ upon the world. Blindness to the radicality of subversion as a ­modality of dynamism is what this chapter seeks to expose and address, through an analysis of Baudrillard’s conceptualization of evil as related to the question concerning technology.

Technology and the nature of the real A century ago Max Weber famously spoke of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ in terms of the world’s rationalization, which he equated with scientization and intellectualization (Weber 1946; Germain 1993). M ­ odernity, for him, is typified by the proliferation of mean-ends or technical rationality, to

34  Gilbert Germain the relative exclusion of questions related to ends or meaning. Weber ­worried that a disenchanted world is destined to become spiritually ­moribund as a consequence of its preoccupation with developing practical solutions to pragmatic concerns. He responded to this perceived spiritual crisis by underscoring the difference in kind between technical considerations and those related to meaning, and by arguing that the ever-extending ambit of our powers of technological control leaves unanswered more than ever the question: To what end ought we deploy our wits? To pose the previous question is to assume a problematic duality. It is to ­ uestions suggest that we moderns inhabit two universes of thought, where q related to means and ends remain distinguishable. Arguably, they no longer are. Questions pertaining to how we choose to act and to what end are effectively fused today, as revealed in the etymology of the term ‘technology’ i­tself, a conjoining of the art of making (techne) and knowing (logos). The union of making and knowing means that a technical understanding of the world brings with it an agenda grounded in its reconstruction: ­K nowledge for us is perceived as inherently practical, which is to say that technology’s will-topower is in the service of ends internal to its own impetus. As modernity’s ‘independent variable’, technology and the ethos of mastery set the limits of the possible (Darby 2004: 70). The Weberian solution to the disenchantment problematic holds ­appeal because of its guarded optimism. The technological juggernaut—the ­tyranny of modern rationalization—can be subverted only if the challenge facing modern humanity is recognized for what it is. In Wilhelm Hennis’s influential opinion, the challenge that comprises the central question for ­Weber was less the processes of rationalization than the fate of the increasingly depersonalized subject in the context of a disenchanted world. ­Hennis’s anthropological reading has Weber focus on the growing alienation of ‘the human’ from those systemic forces that undermine an affirmative sense of self (Hennis 1988). Weber himself alludes to as much when he notes, for example, that ‘culture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness’ (Weber 1946: 357). Acknowledging this growing disconnect between self and world is preparatory to any sustained effort to secure a life worth living in a world fixated with matters related to functionality and efficiency. Jean Baudrillard sees differently the challenge confronting ­humanity in the midst of a rationalized world order. The rationality trap Weber called modernity’s ‘iron cage’ no longer for Baudrillard works entirely at cross-­purposes to the flourishing of the human person. To the extent we ­remain bound within a rationalized system, for Baudrillard it is one within which the human quotient largely has been integrated. Alienation therefore is not the problem today, or at least not the primary problem. He says ­succinctly: ‘Up to now I think that technology has been analyzed in too realistic a way. Accordingly, it has been typecast as a medium of alienation and ­depersonalization’ (Baudrillard 2017: 157). Weber’s problem, from this

Technology and the subversion of control  35 viewpoint, is his common sense assessment that a managed world, a world brought under the yolk of efficient control, is unresponsive to elements that constitute the human personality. In a word, technological systems of control are perceived as cold or inhuman by virtue of their ruthless effectiveness. They run ­counter to the human affinity for spontaneity, for sentiment, for error, or for misjudgment. Baudrillard is not unsympathetic to this ‘­critical or ­pejorative’ account of technology (Baudrillard 2017: 156). However, what interests him more than the purported inhumanity of technology is the curious contrariness that subverts the technological will-to-mastery and thus holds the potential to lead to a re-perceiving of the real better aligned with reality than the technological worldview. My appropriation of Baudrillard’s analysis of evil aims to argue that technology is less an agent of subversion along the lines suggested by creative destruction than it is a project subverted by a dynamic greater than that of technical mastery. Although not unrelated, the subversive effects of evil in the technological era take two general forms. The first pertains to the tangible, real-world consequences of the contemporary drive to realize what Baudrillard calls, variously, ‘oneness’, ‘identity’, or ‘totality’.7 He contends that technology is propelled at bottom by a desire to make whole what is thought fractured, hence the contemporary obsession with interactivity and ‘systematization’. A premium today is placed on having everything interact seamlessly with everything else, including humans and their tools, and to operationalize ­reality in this way with increasing efficiency. It should be noted that, by underscoring the linkage between technology and systemization, Baudrillard addresses the theme of liminality as it relates to what arguably is the central feature of the modern era. It is precisely an awareness of the borderless, limitless, homogenized sameness of a reconstituted reality that compels him to both address and redress this condition. In popular literature, the identification of technology with the drive ­toward systematization is perhaps captured best by Kevin Kelly’s neologism ‘technium’, which he defines as ‘a self-reinforcing system of creation’ (Kelly 2010: 12). Kelly’s arguments include everything that contributes to and is associated with the effort to recreate the real. Technical devices, communications and management systems, and cultural and intellectual supports are among the primary features of the technium. Importantly, for Kelly, the technium constitutes, along with the ‘cosmos’ and the ‘bios’—the universe and life itself—a ‘single thread of self-generation’ (Baudrillard 2013: 356). More than that, as a universal force, technology for Kelly fulfills a universal drive to expand ‘life’s fundamental goodness’ (Kelly 2010: 359). The universe’s telos is to self-generate goodness and we humans, with the aid of technology, participate in the cosmos’ will to self-integration. Shorn of its cosmic pretentions, Baudrillard agrees with Kelly’s reading of technology’s modus operandi. Calling it ‘Integral Reality’, Baudrillard’s version of the technium involves ‘the perpetuating on the world of an unlimited operational project whereby everything becomes real, everything

36  Gilbert Germain becomes visible, everything comes to fruition and has meaning’ ­(Baudrillard 2013: 13). The drive to impose value and meaning on everything, ­Baudrillard commonly refers to as aestheticization, which he aligns with ‘culture’, a ‘homologue of industry and technology’ (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002: 20). To be clear, Baudrillard here is making a sociological claim about today’s prevailing civilizational disposition. He contends the technological mind is propelled by a mania to make sense—human sense—of everything it ­encounters, arguably as a prelude to furthering the quest for absolute mastery. Baudrillard counters this cultural bias by questioning the premise sustaining the technological project. The technological imaginary is the primary object of his critical inquiry. Is it the case, he asks, that the powers of the human mind are aligned with the world in a way that facilitates the latter’s transparency and domination? Clearly, techno-boosters such as Kelly answer in the affirmative. As stated, he contends the technium is fulfilling the cosmos’ plan for itself, the greatest of conceivable aesthetic achievements. Such thinking is magical, from Baudrillard’s perspective. For him, the attempt to integrate reality contravenes the order of things, resulting in what he calls the ‘blowback of duality’.8 The dualism to which he alludes here is the opposition, endemic to the nature of the real, between the principles of ‘good’ (le bien) and ‘evil’ (la mal). The ‘fundamental rule’ of reality is duality, Baudrillard avers (Baudrillard 2013: 145). Everything that offends this rule, such as the drive to integrate ­reality, meets with the ‘violent resurgence’ of duality, with evil (Baudrillard 2013:  145). Like a roly-poly toy, the world for Baudrillard is self-righting. Push too hard in the direction of the good—of systematization and ­transparency— and prepare for blowback in the form of disruption and disintegration. In The Transparency of Evil, especially, Baudrillard details the various ways in which technological interventions aimed at enhancing functionality end up provoking new effloresces of disorder, or reversals of fortune, often leading to consequences more dire (from a human perspective) than the ones these interventions originally were intended to eradicate.9 Baudrillard may not be the first to acknowledge the revenge effects of modern technology, but his account of the conditions that facilitate pushback deepens our appreciation of its implacability.10

Duality and subversion as modalities of dynamism It is worth noting that Baudrillard’s evolving exploration of the subversive power of duality led him to look beyond the more tangible consequences of a misplaced sense of the real. Concerns over issues such as our collective responsibility for the emergence of superbugs is met with an interest in how evil, or the principle of reversibility, might destabilize the subject-led thrust of technological interventionism. Baudrillard contends, then, that the principle of reversibility also strikes at heart of the relationship between

Technology and the subversion of control  37 subject and object, the mover and the moved. An unexpected outcome of the ­subject’s attempt to dominate the object, to have the object disappear as a force that resists or subverts the technological will, is the object’s r­ evenge upon the subject. Baudrillard highlights the dynamic that cancels by ­reversing the classical technological disposition. The technological realm, he surmises, inadvertently sets up the conditions and thus ‘the site where the world or the object plays with the subject’ (Baudrillard 2017: 156). Before expounding on what Baudrillard means by this, it is important to review what so far has been said with regard to the technology-subversion nexus. At the least critical level of analysis, we noted that technology aligns with the power of creative destruction. Technology changes the world: The dynamic relationship between actor and acted upon here is a­ ssumed to be largely unidirectional. Underappreciated is the extent to which the world— including the reconstructed technological order—subverts the technological will. This counter-dynamic constitutes the focus of Baudrillard’s analysis of technology. With him, we have advanced the hypothesis that technology itself is impacted by a dynamic of subversion rooted in the world’s constitution. There is something inherent in the nature of reality that forever ­frustrates the quest to integrate reality.11 It may be objected at this point that the putative ‘dynamic’ Baudrillard ­addresses remains under-theorized or, worse, poorly conceptualized. What is the status of evil, his favored term for the principle of disjunction and disorder? In responding to this potential concern, I think it is important to note that Baudrillard is fully cognizant of the history of philosophical discourse and past attempts to secure truth claims by rational means. He is also aware, as is any student of philosophy, that all past efforts to ground securely arguments of a metaphysical or ontological nature have proven to be provisional and incomplete. There is no ‘final word’ with respect to philosophical concerns, as Socrates well understood at the outset of the Western tradition of intellectual inquiry. I read and approach Baudrillard as having quit the philosophical quest to couch his theoretical arguments in the comforting but misleading language of apodictic claims to truth. It is evident that his theorizing skirts the norms of traditional philosophical discourse. Equally evident is that this evasion is intentional. To require of Baudrillard’s thought what he himself refuses to demand of it leads to unnecessary and avoidable frustration. Baudrillard grounds his critique of the technological reading of the real by observing the world of common experience. He deduces from his observations a dynamic that arguably underpins the world’s movement, including the technological dynamo. This dynamic, for him, serves as sufficient to lay a counter-claim that upends what Baudrillard perceives as the metaphysical faith underpinning the technological project. Any further requirement to provide philosophical ‘proof’ of the veracity of his presumed metaphysical position falls into the trap of demanding more from reason than reason reasonably can be expected to provide, at least as seen from the lights of Baudrillard’s understanding of the bounds of human ratiocination.

38  Gilbert Germain Relatedly, I think as well it is not self-contradictory to make a truth claim regarding the limits of truth claims, as Baudrillard appears to do with ­respect to his analysis of worldviews. I am reminded in this regard of the ­phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comment on human vision that the appearing world resists being ‘all actual under the look’ ­(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 191). His point here underscores the perspectival nature of perception, and thus the impossibility of total or comprehensive vision. To be cognizant of the limits of perception, of the ambiguities attending every perceptual act, is precisely what Baudrillard highlights with regard to the ­understanding of reality implied in our collective commitment to the technological ideal. ­Underscoring the limits of understanding in no way leads to a position of radical relativism. Just as there may be better and worse vantage points from ­ audrillard certain which to assess visually a given landscape, so too for B understandings of the nature of things may be better aligned with the real than others. In parallel fashion, the same relationship exists between map and territory. While no map by definition is identical with the territory it maps, not all representations of reality are equally f­ elicitous. The determination of which representations are truer than others is ultimately a matter of judgment, based on a perceived congruence or fit between idea and reality. Yet it remains the case, according to this line of reasoning, that no single perspective on the ‘truth’ of the world can lay claim to the world’s intellectual ­mastery. To believe otherwise is to fall prey to the ruse of technological thinking. As we have seen, Baudrillard argues that faith in the myth of the perfectibility of reality sustains the technological imaginary. The evidence for such an assessment is drawn from a reading of the current state of technological adventurism: We act into nature as if nature were perfectible. We confirm this presupposition through our interactions with the world. Baudrillard strives to have us interpret this faith as misplaced. He draws attention to the fact that biological and technological systems are not alone in being prone to destabilization when overly integrated. So, too, is the subject-object ­relationship that sustains the technological disposition. Underpinning more overt expressions of reality’s duality, we witness the world’s revenge against the subject as a result of the world’s demotion to a conquerable ‘object’. ­Reality, arguably, has the last laugh in the technological tussle between ‘us’ and ‘it’. This datum we moderns are unable to countenance. Wedded to the technological ideal, our default position is to assume that despite invariable setbacks, measured progress is being made in systematizing reality, in integrating the world and our place within it so as to constitute a seamless entity of pure positive functionality of the sort Kevin Kelly would have us believe is our due and destiny. Baudrillard lays down a radically contrary assessment. He would not subscribe to the growing consensus that humanity has entered the so-called Anthropocene Epoch,12 despite the planet-altering effects of modern technology. Ours is not a ‘human-centered’ era in any simple sense because the notion that subtends such a vision—the controlling subject—is for Baudrillard an illusion produced in the fog of technological domination.

Technology and the subversion of control  39

The reality problematic To understand how we might be fooled in this regard requires considering what Baudrillard means by ‘illusion’ and its use in his overall account of the technological problematic. First, we should note that illusion for him refers to a condition of the world of everyday experience. Reality is illusory, Baudrillard asserts, in the sense that the world is not what it seems to be. The modern sensibility holds the opposite view that reality is real. The ­perspectival quality of worldviews remains lost on us. Baudrillard therefore suggests we moderns are naïve realists. Our cultural disposition assumes mind can seize reality in a way that reveals its essential nature or truth. The preferred manner of apprehension for us is through modern scientific reasoning. It follows that technoscientific reasoning provides the same function for modernity as Christianity did for medieval Europe—the path to true understanding. To this extent modern rationality assumes the aura of the divine or sacred.13 Baudrillard’s epistemological stance rejects the view that reality is constituted in a way that lends itself to intellectual ­transparency through any means, modern or other. Clearly, the real reveals itself in ways  that make claims to transparency possible or plausible. But for Baudrillard the notion that reality can be ‘seen through’ is simply ­untenable. The socalled ‘objective’ illusion of the world rests with an u ­ nderstanding that the ‘world … is never what it seems’. Baudrillard adds: ‘It [reality] presents itself as one thing, but it’s something else’ (Baudrillard 2017: 159). ­Because reality is opaque with respect to meaning and truth, reality for him is constituted in such a way that no single reading of the real has a ­monopoly on truth. Yet, as previously noted, it should not be concluded from this that Baudrillard’s position is entirely relativist either, for there are in his ­estimation readings of the real that get reality right and others that do not. The ones that do not refuse to come to terms with the objective illusion of the world. With these latter worldviews the subject is seduced by the illusion that reality is real, whereas for Baudrillard the closest we can come to the truth of the world is to be mindful that no such comprehensive truth is available to us. In the final analysis, this means for Baudrillard that every articulation of the meaning of the real is allusive or metaphorical, whether perceived as such or not. All great cultures, he contends, respect the world’s illusory character or what amounts to the same thing: the limits of our capacity to apprehend the world in its totality (Baudrillard 2017: 157). Illusion has a double character for Baudrillard. On the one side, reality objectively is illusory, as described earlier. On the other, the ‘reality’ of the world’s illusion is either accepted or not depending on the character of its subjective reception. Baudrillard is convinced our cultural disposition is aggressively unreceptive to the illusion of the real. The modern age is reality obsessed. Every verified scientific discovery tends to reaffirm the thinking self’s special privilege as knower of the real. Every new technological device extending the powers of human mastery over nature substantiates the

40  Gilbert Germain notion that the human will-to-power knows no bounds. Yet, paradoxically, for Baudrillard it is precisely this technological matrix that sets up the conditions for ‘the disappearance of the subject’. In the attempt to make the world our own, we unwittingly create a milieu that upsets the ‘metaphysical opposition between the object and the subject’ (Baudrillard 2017: 157). Baudrillard states unequivocally that his interests lay with ‘whatever subverts [emphasis mine] rational or real systems’. His predilection is to focus on what undermines order and stability, whether that order is natural or humanly created. Accidents and reversals are to Baudrillard what ‘the swerve’ (Greenblatt 2012) represents to Lucretian atomism, the force that keeps the world ‘in play’. Arguably the most radical revenge effect triggered by the systematization of the world through technological intervention is the subversion of the relationship between the ‘controlling’ subject and the ‘passive’ object. While not discounting technology’s foundational role in the rationalizing of reality and the concomitant extension of the powers of ­human mastery, he entertains a counterclaim that the controlling subject is entwined simultaneously with the object in a way that displaces the ­former from its position as an active agent. A reversal takes place where the ­subject, rather than being simply the cause of technological effects, becomes an ­effect of the object the technological system seeks to radically remake. Doing full justice to Baudrillard’s nuanced account of the revenge of the object requires we revisit momentarily Baudrillard’s understanding of evil, the principle of disjunction or negativity that is constitutive of the world’s duality. By definition, a technological order is one that works to erase every vestige of negativity and the object. Evil is its nemesis. But in the effort to erase evil, evil we said reasserts itself by disrupting the goal of vanquishing the object. To the extent that liminality is associated ambiguity, with the suspension or dissolution of clearly defined boundaries, Baudrillard’s observations regarding the reversibility of subject-object dynamic speak to the liminal core of the modern technological experience. At the most obvious level, this reverse dynamic is evidenced by the fact that the one thing seemingly beyond our collective control is the mania for mastery. A culture that revels in its powers of control is itself curiously addicted to the ethic of domination driving it forward. As earlier articulated by the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the dialectic of enlightenment—the progressive freeing of humanity from mythological thinking—has led to a new mythological dispensation where the ethos of domination turns ideological or blindly self-reproducing (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 7–8). The social phenomenon defined by an irrational attachment to modern rationality has been addressed more recently in our culture’s embrace of a ‘solutionist’ ethic (Morozov 2013). One need not have read Baudrillard to realize that the technological worldview is premised on a mind-set that takes as given two presuppositions. The first is the previously stated assumption that reality is in need of a radical makeover. The notion that the

Technology and the subversion of control  41 given world—the natural order—is seriously flawed or misconstructed is deeply rooted within the modern mind-set. Thomas Hobbes’s subtle but uncompromising assertion that God is an incompetent artificer provides one glaring example of the thinking behind the call to remake reality—political reality, in this case—in a manner more responsive to the human demand for good order. Insofar as artifice redeems nature, nature is not ‘good’ in the Baudrillardian sense of the term, which is to say that nature’s order is interpenetrated with disorder. So it is, for example, that the orderly cycle of life on Earth is compromised whenever an interplanetary object of sufficient mass intersects the Earth’s orbit, or that we humans succumb to disease whenever a biological mechanism is thrown off its self-appointed regulatory function. The second and decisive feature of the technological mind-set is that these natural ‘accidents’ are deemed unacceptable. For us, eruptions of ‘evil’ are regarded as problems for which solutions are wanting. Our age is solutionist, then, because it is taken as axiomatic that the problematic nature of nature is resolvable. We moderns act out the Hobbesian edict to remake reality. We inhabit a cultural milieu that takes the dysfunctional character of reality as a challenge to reconstitute it in ways that overcome its perceived deficiencies. The technological worldview is incapable of accommodating within its parameters the concept of duality or evil, for to do so would be to concede the unattainability of the technological ideal of human mastery. We want to believe that what besets us is eradicable, that mere ‘misfortune’ stands in the way of the project to integrate reality, simple correctible blips within otherwise smoothly operating systems of order (Baudrillard 2013: 107–122). In short, we want to believe the good is reality’s default setting. Baudrillard tells us differently. Evil for him is as integral to reality as the good. It is a permanent feature of the real and its presence suffuses reality with a tragic element unacknowledged in the technological order. Baudrillard argues that the primary challenge confronting modernity is neither the recalcitrant object (the, as yet, unknown and unmastered ‘other’) nor the ‘misfortunes’ affecting systems. As a result, modernity’s favored solution—finding increasingly sophisticated ways to eradicate the world’s infelicities in an effort to integrate reality—is for him entirely spurious. Rather, in Baudrillard’s view, the central problem is rooted in our collective incapacity to acknowledge and appreciate fully the condition that sees to it the technological dream remains unrealizable. The solutionist agenda for Baudrillard is therefore a farce because the world is not constituted in a way that lends itself to the realization of its objective. In short, and to repeat, neglected is the fundamental role played by evil in the world. Baudrillard calls evil not a moral principle but one that effectively destabilizes the good. It is a principle of ‘instability and vertigo, a principle of complexity and foreignness … a principle of incompatibility, antagonism, and irreducibility’ (Baudrillard 1993: 122). As argued, in our ­technological age ‘good’ is associated with functionality, with the systematizing of any

42  Gilbert Germain and all kinds of processes. The world’s fundamental duality means the forces of order and operationality are pitted against a contrary power. To repeat, the technological mind takes this opposing force to be eradicable. ­Consequently, from the technological perspective, the oppositional pairing ‘good/evil’ (or order/disorder) is itself deemed good insofar as the tension between the two is believed resolvable through technological means. True to form, we moderns narrativize the disruptive personal and social effects of drugs, disease, terrorism, and all kinds of negativity and corruption as winnable wars. In so doing we reconfirm the bias regarding the inherent goodness of the world: We presume the challenges the world presents us are surmountable and the rewards garnered by their defeat are unambiguously beneficial. Baudrillard’s evil is not ours. As noted, we moderns interpret the good/ evil opposition as resolvable in principle, if not entirely in fact (Baudrillard 2017: 159). Baudrillard rejects the Hegelian supposition undergirding this expectation. The evidence does not show that evil is reducible to a moment of some dialectical opposition, he maintains. To the contrary, the revenge effects of technology cannot be skirted. To conceive of evil’s consequences in these terms normalizes the concept by clearing the path to evil’s overcoming. Baudrillard counters by arguing that reality is not good. It is not constructed in a way that permits either its fathomability or its total domination by human means. But, if not good, neither is reality evil in the sense that the world works entirely at cross-purposes to properly human interests and concerns. Baudrillard argues, contrarily, that a ‘perverse reversibility’ marks the relationship between good and evil which renders it ‘illusory to consider the two principles [good and evil] separately and think there is a possible choice between them based on some kind of moral reason’ ­(Baudrillard 2003: 86). Thinking the two principles together means realizing that the forces of disorder and disorder are interchangeable, that the establishment of order can, by the act itself, provoke an irruption of disorder as well as the reverse. The ‘illusion of technology’ disregards this reversibility and misleads us into assuming one of the principles—namely, the good—has priority over the other. Again, the concept of liminality provides a useful heuristic to explain the counter-narrative to the technological narrative, as outlined here. Entertained is the notion that reality is more ambiguously structured than the technological imaginary typically assumes. Baudrillard attempts to sensitize us to the ways in which reality confounds our expectations for it, to argue that our efforts to humanize fully reality are necessarily self-defeating. It may be worth noting that Baudrillard’s critique of technology could very well be strategically motivated. It seems plausible, given his understanding of modernity’s obsession with operationalizing reality, that a reaction to the imbalance of forces driving the technological project may involve a claim underscoring the world’s brokenness. Against the tyranny of modern rationality, Baudrillard adopts the pose of an epistemological

Technology and the subversion of control  43 skeptic. Against the vanquishing of the object, he valorizes the object and its ultimate inscrutability. Reminiscent of an Aristotelian approach to ethics, Baudrillard may be interpreted as responding to the deficiencies of the technological worldview by advancing an alternative to it that effects a more balanced understanding of our embeddedness in the world (Aristotle 2004). Motivations aside, Baudrillard submits the technological worldview ­erroneously conceives reality as a system marked by corrigible design flaws. Consider, in this regard, Elon Musk’s reflection on his t­ echnological ­a mbitions: ‘I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad’.14 Contemplating a future where the ­a ctivist agenda has stalled demoralizes Musk because it signifies the failure of the technological dream to rehabilitate reality. Musk’s effort to have humans inhabit Mars caricatures the technological imperative to make ‘good’ an alien reality. The problem with this objective, Baudrillard observes, is that it ‘attempts to control not that which is, but that which … ought not to exist’ [author’s emphasis] (Baudrillard 2003: 86). Applied to the case examined here, the assertion is that Musk and his fellow technophiles work with an idealized nature, a dream world informed by the moral postulate that evil ought not be. Accordingly, the solution to our ill-founded despair eschews dealing with the world as it is in an effort to cope better with its (and our) limits, and opts instead to act into nature on the false premise of its perfectibility. Pretending evil is eradicable and acting on this fantasy does nothing to mitigate evil’s effects, and only exacerbates them. It is simply delusional from Baudrillard’s perspective to deny duality by assuming everything is reducible to a single principle, namely, the good. Baudrillard argues that rather than devote our energies to discerning the laws of nature as a means of perfecting reality—a project whose misreading of the real dooms it to failure—we would be better positioned if, as a society, we adopt the strategy that previously cited ‘great cultures’ have f­ ollowed and respond to the world’s illusion ‘by illusion’ (Baudrillard 2003: 66). Baudrillard here suggests we ought reconsider the wisdom of responding to the enigma of the real by claiming it to be a phantom residue of incomplete understanding. We moderns manage illusion by appealing to the truth. ­Illusion for us is a mirage produced by ignorance of the order of things. We deem knowledge to be our due, and along with it the powers of mastery over the world. The alternative tactic Baudrillard espouses is grounded in reacquainting ourselves with the very thing our technological civilization has done such an effective job extirpating—otherness.

On otherness Perhaps more than the prospect of inhabiting the Red Planet, the fantasy of a terraformed Mars epitomizes the technological desire to de-alienate the ­alien (or de-objectify the object) by literally making a foreign world

44  Gilbert Germain ­ arthlike. This wish perfectly expresses the technological temperament: E ­Reality is redeemed by ridding reality of otherness. In a word, technology seeks to make the world user-friendly, to excise from the world its objecthood. In contrast, we might say, Baudrillard wishes to Martianize the Earth, in the sense of having us regain a sense of the world’s mystery or opaqueness. If an object means literally that which is ‘thrown against’15 the subject, then the object is the ground zero of subversion. The Korean-born German cultural theorist, Byung-Chul Han, speaks eloquently to the same theme. He stands by Baudrillard with the claim that the ‘Other’ or ‘object’ is ‘what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego’ (Han 2017: 1). The alien Other is said to be ‘atopic’, placeless or strange, in its resistance to being folded into the human space or place where meaning and value are bestowed upon things. Baudrillard maintains that, by definition, great societies acknowledge ­reality’s inherent obduracy. It is understood that aspirations to have the world conform to our ideas and ideals are always thwarted, an ­understanding grounded in recognizing the limits of the powers of human reason and ­practical mastery. There exists in these cultures an awareness that not all can be lit by the light of reason, that the world resists being rendered intellectually transparent despite efforts to have it yield its secrets. The French writer Albert Camus addressed this same sentiment in his essay ‘Helen’s ­Exile’.16 He commends in this work the balance of the ancient Greek mind, its respect for the fact that (as Baudrillard once quipped in a different context) it is in the nature of meaning not for everything to have it (Baudrillard 2013: 17). We moderns have broken this equilibrium. We reject outright that we might not be privy to total understanding. We take it as a moral postulate that the world exists to be fathomed in its totality, and impugn any teaching that suggests otherwise as obscurantist. Camus likens this modern imbalance to aesthetic disfigurement. There is something existentially ­repugnant about a culture that refuses to concede on principle any limit to its powers of understanding and, consequently, any limit to its powers of domination. Not everything is fodder for the human gristmill. It is precisely the modern propensity to homogenize the human experience, to render the unequal equal, and to assume that everything can be brought within the ambit of human understanding and control, which links Baudrillard’s critique of modernity with Camus’s reception of ancient Greek culture. The imbalance to which Camus and Baudrillard speak leads to the latter’s indictment of a milieu founded on the exclusion of the principle of otherness. This charge is contained in Baudrillard’s expression ‘the hell of the same’17 or, in Han’s comparable idiom, ‘the inferno of the same’ (Han 2017: 1). With allusions to Homer’s depiction of Hades as a (liminal) realm without distinctions, Baudrillard contends technology aims at a similar end—a world without the other. There is a temptation, of which B ­ audrillard is acutely aware, to conflate otherness and difference that cuts to the essence of his understanding of the illusion of technology. The two concepts are distinct in his view because the term ‘difference’ connotes polarities

Technology and the subversion of control  45 ‘differentiated along a single scale of values’, a reading Baudrillard seeks to offset with an interpretation in line with a symbolic understanding of order ­(Baudrillard 1993: 145). Modern commodity cultures discount the world’s radical ­alterity—its exoticism—partly because they inhabit a consumerist environment that sees everything as exchangeable in accordance with a monetary value scale. ­Otherness here is superimposed on a common yardstick, an underlying unity, which flattens out distinctions and robs them of their existential heft. Take as an illustration of this diminution the aforementioned technological understanding of good and evil. We moderns imagine good ­w ithout evil because we regard them as separable forces, and we imagine them separable because we see them as forces occupying different points along the same axis of values. On the axis of functionality, some things are conceived as ­contributing to greater performativity and some as detracting. Erasing those elements that impede functionality thus leads to improved f­ unctionality, so goes the assumption. Understanding evil as ‘different’ than good is the ­object of Baudrillard’s critique in the effort to deconstruct the reigning conception of dysfunctionality. In fact, he adds, seeing self and world, s­ ubject and object, as simply different is precisely what keeps us from coming to an appraisal of reality as object (Baudrillard 1993: 144). The technological mind consistently misreads by downplaying the degree to which the world resists capture. Baudrillard argues that the real is not something ‘out there’ to be fathomed, manipulated, and endowed with fixed meaning. It does not exist to be drawn into the realm of human purposes. Rather, the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘it’ takes the form of a game, a game of reversibility, as previously noted. The symbolic order of the world to which Baudrillard subscribes ‘implies dual and complex forms that are not dependent on the distinction between ego and other’. Self and object, and other dualities, are for him better interpreted as ‘reversible moments’ or ‘mutually reinforcing aspects of an immutable order’ (Baudrillard 1993: 145). Again, in arguing this Baudrillard is not discounting the obvious, namely, that ‘technology functions rationally’ (Baudrillard 2017: 158). He simply presents for consideration the proposition that technology’s logic—the logic of domination—in no way tells the full story of our relationship with the world. The technological worldview is ill disposed to conceive anything as having the capacity to radically subvert the human will to ­k nowledge and power. Baudrillard’s retelling of the reality problematic reinstates subversion as a potent force in the world. The technological logic of domination is overturned by a world that refuses to comply with our demands for its submission. Rather, as argued, the world plays with us. In Baudrillard’s words: ‘[T]echnology can be seen as a whole domain within which the subject thinks they [sic] can seize the world, transform it, interpret it and so on, but from which the world escapes’ (Baudrillard 1993: 159). What escapes technology is not so much the world, per se, but a reading of reality that abandons seeing the ego and the other as opposites or

46  Gilbert Germain alternatives. To interpret the world in these terms is to imagine the possible dominion of one over the other, or the realization of a dialectical resolution between the two. Parallel to Michel Foucault’s understanding of agon, as treated in his essay ‘The Subject and Power’, Baudrillard reads the relationship between the two as fundamentally ‘antagonistic’.18 As revealed by the term’s etymology, antagonistic relations are marked by a contest or struggle between rivals. This agon lends the relationship between self and other, the character of a game—the play between opponents. In games, opponents are not interchangeable. A game is not improved by having one rival dramatically overpower the other, or by having the rivals coordinate actions to make the game ostensibly more exciting. The rules of a game set up the conditions within which the reality of game playing unfolds, and antagonistic contests are by definition aleatory. That is to say, rivals (subject and object) effectively wrestle each other in an unpredictable and nonsystemic manner that precludes any foreseeable pattern of development or predetermined end. Baudrillard asserts this stance is resolutely anti-metaphysical in that the game the world plays with us is not performed in accordance with a principle or code that transcends the game itself. The existence of such a unitary code would compromise the world’s fundamental duality. It would render good and evil (or subject and object) values in a system of generalized e­ xchange, resulting in a ‘bloodless and undifferentiated world’ (Baudrillard 2002a: 65), whereas for Baudrillard, the world’s duality reserves a special place for the unique and unpredictable, for the singular or ‘pure’ event.19 Baudrillard finds in the persistent resurgence of singular events proof that reality is not constituted in a way that permits its indefinite systematization. What the contemporary zeitgeist considers catastrophic or disastrous—­ terrorism, computer viruses, the rise of superbugs, etc.—he reads as a kind of cosmic resettling of accounts, a reminder that reality plays by its rules, not ours. Underpinning Baudrillard’s usage of terms such as ‘object’, ‘other’, or ‘evil’ is the notion of subversion, the ‘vital principle of disjunction’ (Baudrillard 1993: 122) that keeps the world from becoming an integrated or interactive whole. As our culture works to aestheticize reality, and in direct response to the urgency of this push, the world responds by subverting this ideal, by seeing to it that the reordered reality of our desire deviates from its intended end. Baudrillard is adamant: ‘[A]estheticisation is not part of the real’. Yet he is equally assured the ‘domain of order and equivalence’ informed by aestheticisation cannot be escaped (Baudrillard and Nouvel, 2002: 21). Herein lies Baudrillard’s aversion to the utopianism that inflects and infects most of today’s discourses on technology. As the project to integrate reality intensifies, so will the reversals of fortune that compensate for this forward thrust, resulting most worryingly in a possible posthuman apocalypse.20 Baudrillard sought refuge from modern culture in the only way he thought remained viable, by finding in his own experience as a citizen of the

Technology and the subversion of control  47 technological order a means of reconnecting with the other. E ­ xperiencing the principle of disjunction through technology gave him succor in the age of equivalencies. Apart from his writing, it was in photography that Baudrillard found sanctuary from the undifferentiated sameness of contemporary existence. Through image-making, he accessed a means of recuperating the loss of the object, or the object’s ‘secret’, as he calls it (Baudrillard and ­Nouvel 2002: 19). Borrowing from the French structuralist ­philosopher ­Roland Barthes’s account of the allure of the photographic image, ­Baudrillard refers to this secret as a ‘punctum’, the element in an image that holds the power to arrest or grab one’s attention, often despite the picture-­ taker’s intended aim in framing a scene.21 Baudrillard’s appropriation of this term seems directed equally to the act of photographing and the content of the photographic image. He appears to understand, and appreciate, that the ultimate determinant of what gets imaged is that undefinable (and, ultimately, unrepresentable) something that commands the eye. The punctum is a singular event where a glint of light, an emerging geometry of forms, or other captivating nuance, draws the eye and prompts the world’s capture. Calling to mind Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of the ‘magical relation’ between seer and seen,22 Baudrillard asserts that this ‘primitive’ or decentered relationship with things is within everyone’s reach, with or without the aid of a technical device such as a camera (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002: 26). It is worth noticing, parenthetically, that Baudrillard is convinced the ­digital image, since it is an object of construction, is not up to the task of representing the real in a way that conforms to its secret. The best photograph for Baudrillard is one that reflects the indeterminacy of the world it ­represents. If the reality we observe with unaided eyes withholds its ­essence, representations of reality likewise ought be allusive, incomplete, and ­seductive, in his estimation. Such representations come closest to seizing the world as object or pure event, a capture that by definition cannot be within the power of the subject to effect by artificial means. In sum, for Baudrillard a technological device can further an appreciation of the illusion of the real. If, as argued earlier, technology tends to advance the subjective illusion that the self is capable of seizing the world, Baudrillard contends there is nothing inherent in technology that precludes its enabling the reverse—an awareness of the objective illusion of the real. The photographic image is a case in point. This image, ­Baudrillard says, stands as a ‘microscopic paradigm’ of a more general possibility, one where ‘the metaphysical opposition between the subject and the object has perhaps been destabilized in some way by technology’ (Baudrillard 2017: 157). In arguing that technology may not be inherently averse to our countenancing the world as object, Baudrillard suggests technology may hold the power to re-enchant the world. But this is no Weberian solution to the disenchantment problematic. Weber, to recall, assumed the problem of meaning in a technical universe may be corrected with a value transfusion,

48  Gilbert Germain supplied by persons of vision in positions of cultural or political authority. In contrast, for Baudrillard the technological order has created precisely the opposite problem, namely, a surfeit or an overproduction of meaning and value as a result of the progressive humanization of the world. What needs revivifying for him, then, is an awareness of the sheer facticity of things, the nothingness that resides in things that lends reality its mystery and power. If for Baudrillard photography is a refuge because, he says, ‘everything in that field is enchanting’ (Baudrillard 2017: 211), then the magic that attends the image holds the potential to be regenerated more broadly in our technological environment. There is nothing in a subject-centered universe that dictates it need remain so. But to Baudrillard’s credit, he remains noncommittal about this prospect, because reversals of the sort required to upset the metaphysical balance between subject and object are by definition not bound by any developmental law (Baudrillard 2017: 157). Evil, Baudrillard believes, is bound to disrupt or subvert the good as understood by the technological mind, but when, how, and to what extent the subject disappears in acts of reversal remains indeterminable. To conclude, Baudrillard argues that, most radically, subversion manifests itself today in system self-disruption. The technological drive to master or de-objectify reality produces its own blowback, according to the rules of the game that comprise the real. The ‘accident’ of technology extends to the reign of the subject and ensures that, should this reign remain otherwise secure, the foreclosure of the object will never be total. Enchantment is inextinguishable. Although the focus of this investigation has been squarely on Jean ­Baudrillard, for reasons previously cited and now defended, I wish to reemphasize in closing how Baudrillard’s concern over the loss of the object dovetails with analyses of liminality. As articulated anew by Bjørn Thomassen, Agnes Horvath, and others, liminality is theorized as constituting a core ­concept of modernity, one that forefronts the contemporary loss of ­boundaries, limits, stability, and meaning. In a word, the spirit of ­modernity is conceived best by its lack of ‘concreteness’.23 Not much reflection is ­required to realize that Baudrillard’s entire intellectual oeuvre can be read as a parallel effort to analyze liminality, or deeply abstract character of ­modernity. It is precisely that today we have entered a regime where every act, fact, wish, or idea is absorbed into a circulatory system that ­reduces everything to interchangeable or commutative elements within a self-­enclosed whole that Baudrillard contests. It is precisely the loss of meaning attending a limitless and undifferentiated social milieu that he exposes and challenges by highlighting the restorative power held by the object or the singular event. And it is only by confronting that which escapes the human, by recontextualizing the human within an order not of our making, that we may find the kind of meaning that truly befits us as human beings.

Technology and the subversion of control  49

Notes 1 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to subvert is ‘to undermine the power and authority of (an established system or institution)’. The verb is derived from the Latin word subvertere: sub, from below + vertere, to turn. 2 There is a substantial body of literature on the theme of creative destruction. Among the more recent and noted works are Schumpeter (2009), Gans (2016), Cowen (2017), and Mullan (2017). 3 A detailed account of the relationship between world and worldview is found in my Thinking about Technology (2017). See especially Chapter 2, ‘The Ethos of Technology’. 4 The most authoritative and influential work that intersects technology with ­ontology is Heidegger (1982). 5 The idiom ‘act into nature’ is Hannah Arendt’s (1958). She meant by it not just the capacity to manipulate nature in ways that help serve human interests or needs but to alter radically natural processes by means of technical interventions, as we might find with the harnessing of the power of the atom or through genetic engineering. See also Cooper (1991). 6 As explored in this essay, ‘evil’ is a concept that for Baudrillard reverberates with numerous others, such as the ‘object’, ‘duality’, ‘blowback’, and ‘the principle of reversal’, to name a few. A primary exegetical objective of this analysis is to ­reveal how evil cannot be thematized outside a cluster of related conceptual terms. 7 Of the two antagonistic trends that define the real, one is ‘the irreversible movement towards the totalisation of the world’. This, of course, is the movement typically referred to as technological progress. See Baudrillard (2013: 16). 8 As with many of Baudrillard’s key concepts, ‘blowback of duality’ (and related ideas) appears in numerous of his writings. However, Baudrillard’s first serious formulation of the idea appears in The Intelligence of Evil, especially the chapter ­entitled ‘The “Blowback” of Duality’. There, he notes that because ‘our entire ­system, both technical and mental, tends towards oneness, identity and totality’ and because the systemization of reality ‘offends duality’—the so-called ­fundamental rule of reality—‘indefectible duality reestablishes its hold. The blowback of duality avenges Integral Reality through its fracturing’ (­ Baudrillard 2013: 145). 9 I have addressed at some length the so-called metaphysics of Baudrillard’s analysis of blowback in its more mundane register (Germain 2009, 2017). 10 Jacques Ellul, an early and influential analyst of contemporary technology, noted that ‘the positive effects and the negative effects of technology are closely, strangely interrelated. We may say that each technological advance increases both the positive and the negative effects, of which we generally know very little’. See Ellul (1981: 68). More recently, and more pointedly, Edward Tenner has addressed the theme of technology’s revenge effects in Why Things Bite Back. 11 There is an affinity between Baudrillard’s reading of a self-divided reality and Max Scheler’s philosophical articulation of ‘ressentiment’. As Scheler notes, pathological ressentiment is born less from a valuative reaction to an actual ­oppressor than from a self-inflicted personal sense of inadequacy arising comparatively in relation to the presence of positive values and achievements. Scheler provides a full treatment of the pathology in his Ressentiment. 12 In 2000, the term ‘Anthropocene’ was coined by the Nobel Prize-winning ­scientist Paul Crutzen. It signifies a rough consensus, within the scientific community and beyond, that the Earth has entered a new geological e­ poch defined ­overwhelmingly by the effects of human activity. As the term d ­ enotes, the ­A nthropocene is the epoch where humans, not nature, are the primary determinant of the planet’s future course. The Working Group on the A ­ nthropocene

50  Gilbert Germain

13

14 15 16

(WGA) is now seeking formal recognition of the Anthropocene from the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Extending further back in time, it is worth noting the affinity between modern technology and the practice of magic. Magic, one may say, was the name given to the practical arts in the age of enchantment. While both magic and technology seek to domesticate the world, the success of the former is measured within the context of a worldview that assumes nature possesses a mind independent of the human will, and hence not entirely controllable. In contrast, the measure of success of a technical operation lies within the operation itself. That is to say, its measure of success is determined by the effectiveness with which the intended result is realized. Elon Musk made this self-revelatory observation during an interview at the TED 2017 Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The highlights of his interview can be found at: www.inverse.com/article/31049-elon-musk-best-quotes-ted-2017 The noun ‘object’ is derived from the Latin root ob, ‘in front of, towards, or against’ + iacere, ‘to throw’. See ‘Helen’s Exile’, in Camus (1967: 148–149). In Camus’s words: We [moderns] have exiled beauty; the Greeks took arms for it. A basic ­difference—but one that goes far back. Greek thought was always based on the idea of limits. Nothing was carried to extremes, neither religion nor reason, because Greek thought denied nothing, neither reason nor religion. It gave everything its share, balancing light with shade.

17 Baudrillard articulates what is meant by ‘the hell of the same’ in an eponymous chapter found in his Transparency of Evil. 18 As Baudrillard (2017: 191) explains: Duality doesn’t mean at all two, two things, two beings. There may be multiple ones but with duality there is a sort of symbolic exchange, and for challenging you must be opposite, you must be antagonistic, you must not be in a dialectic relation between subjects and objects. See also Foucault’s (2000) ‘The Subject and Power’. 19 A pure event for Baudrillard (2017: 39) is akin to a punctum or singularity in that it arises ‘like a fatality, without explanation or referent’. He continues: ‘The event is an object which derives its overwhelming necessity precisely from its being isolated and disconnected, as in the case with a catastrophe’. Like a photographer who is seduced by a scene, as if from without, certain happenings simply materialize in a manner that defies any prior cause or explanation. It should be noted that Slavoj Žižek’s understanding of the ‘event’ parallels closely Baudrillard’s, to the extent that the former defines the event as ‘the effect that seems to exceed its causes [author’s emphasis]’. He adds: ‘Does everything that exist have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere’? (Žižek 2014: 3–4). 20 Baudrillard’s position on posthumanism is subtle but decisive. He contends that if, through cloning or other technical means, humans transcend their mortal condition, then evaluating this eventuality hinges on our assumptions regarding what makes the species specifically human. On the one hand, should we agree with Kevin Kelly that doing what technology wants represents humanity’s true fate, then a posthumanist future awaits us, a future Baudrillard believes we already are well along the path to realizing. What lies ahead for us looks bright were it not for the fact that we humans are excluded from it. Baudrillard, in contrast, notes in The Disappearance of Culture that he attaches ‘a strong symbolic value to the human species’, one that manifests itself in the centrality of the event or singularity to the human experience. What makes us human for him is the

Technology and the subversion of control  51 play between the subject and object, the human and world, the outcome of which is inherently unpredictable (300). In tandem with this, Baudrillard argues that while thinking must remain subversive and undecidable, it also ‘must at the same time remain humanist, concerned for the human, and, to that end, recapture the reversibility of good and evil, of the human and the inhuman’. In short, any human thinking worth its name must remain in tension with the world’s duality. See Baudrillard (2003: 97–98). 21 As Baudrillard (2017: 157) says: ‘I’m considerably in favor of “punctum”, in the sense of the singularity of the object at a given moment. Or the singularity of the instant outside its interpretive context, at the point where things have no meaning’. The source of inspiration for Baudrillard analysis of photography is contained in Barthes (1982). 22 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay, ‘Eye and Mind’, in Merleau-Ponty (1969). 23 Commenting on Thomassen (2014), Agnes Horvath writes: living under globalised modernity is to experience an uncertain, anguishing condition, where the lifting of boundaries and limits results in a loss of concreteness, stability, articulation, and ultimately of meaning, and which could be best characterised, using anthropological terminology, as a paradoxical situation of permanent liminality. See Agnes Horvath’s review of Thomassen’s Liminality and the Modern in her 2015 article ‘The Perspective of Liminality’, available through the VoegelinView website: https://voegelinview.com/the-perspective-of-liminality/   Baudrillard’s nemesis, we have seen, is the borderless, limitless condition called modernity. The challenge of liminality is met by him through the subversion of Integral Reality, by means of reality’s duality and the principle of evil.   Other related texts on the subject of liminality include Horvath and O’Brien (2013), Horvath, Thomassen, and Wydra (2015), and Horvath and Szakolczai (2018).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment, ­Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle (2004) Nicomachean Ethics, New York: Penguin Classics. Barthes, Roland (1982) Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography, New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean (1993) The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, London: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean (2002a) Screened Out, London: Verso. ——— (2003) Passwords, London: Verso. ——— (2013) The Intelligence of Evil: Or, the Lucidity Pact, London: Bloomsbury. ——— (2017) The Disappearance of Culture: Uncollected Interviews, Edinburgh: ­Edinburgh University Press. Baudrillard, Jean and Nouvel, Jean (2002) The Singular Objects of Architecture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Camus (1967) Lyrical and Critical Essays, New York: Vintage Books. Cooper, Barry (1991) Action into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Technology, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Cowen, Tyler (2017) Creative Destruction: How Globalisation Is Changing the World’s Cultures, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

52  Gilbert Germain Darby, Tom (2004) ‘On Globalisation, Technology, and the New Justice’, in D. Tabachnick and T. Koivukoski (eds) Globalisation, Technology, and P ­ hilosophy, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ellul, Jacques (1981) Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work, Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Foucault, Michel (2000) Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume Three, New York: The New Press. Gans, Joshua (2016) The Disruption Dilemma, Boston, MA: MIT Press. Germain, Gil (2009) Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ——— (2017) Thinking about Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads ­Reality, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Germain, Gilbert (1993) A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Grant, George (1986) Technology and Justice, Toronto: House of Ananasi Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (2012) The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, New York: W.W. Norton. Han, Byung-Chul (2017) The Agony of Eros, Boston, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin (1982) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: HarperCollins. Hennis, Wilhelm (1988) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, London: Allen and Unwin. Horvath, Agnes and O’Brien, John (eds.) (2013) Statesman: The Politics of ­Liminality and the Liminal, Cork: Tivoli. Horvath, Agnes and Szakolczai, Arpad (2018) Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, London: Routledge. Horvath, Agnes, Thomassen, Bjorn, and Wydra, Harald (eds.) (2015) Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, New York: Berghahn Books. Kelly, Kevin (2010) What Technology Wants, New York: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1969) The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Morozov, Evgeny (2013) To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, New York: PublicAffairs. Mullan, Phil (2017) Creative Destruction: How to Start an Economic Renaissance, Bristol: Policy Press. Scheler, Max (1972) Ressentiment, New York: Schocken. Schumpeter, Joseph A. (2009) Can Capitalism Survive? Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy, New York: Harper. Tenner, Edward (1996) Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of ­Unintended Consequences, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Thomassen, Bjorn (2014) Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-­B etween, Farnham: Ashgate. Walker, James R. and Bellamy Jr., Robert V. (1997) Television and the Remote ­Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland, New York: Guilford Press. Weber, Max (1946) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2014) Event: Philosophy in Transit, London: Penguin.

3 The modern schismogenesis in European thought and politics, and the rise of the derivative self Subversion as divinizing the void Camil Francisc Roman Introduction: subversion as divinizing the void As far as we can account for, there is a mythological tradition that has activated the divine as a shield against nothingness: rocks, plants, animals, human beings, nothing ever gets lost, nothing is ever completely purposeless. No wastefulness is possible in ultimate eschatological terms (­Lévy-Bruhl 1975; Eliade 1987). The world is a cosmos with a good order of being in which anthropos lives within the horizon of ultimate meanings. This primary stance towards existence can be traced also in early philosophical reflections. In Plato’s Phaedrus (244–245c), ‘madness’ (manic-mantic) is a divine gift, manifesting itself in prophecy, healing and poetry, thus becoming so many instances of divine mediation restoring human power from blindness, illness/troubles and emotional opaqueness, all to be related to the insinuations of the void in the sense of the experience of nothingness or emptiness. In the Apology (41d), Socrates could claim at the hour of his condemnation that the good reigns supreme – ‘a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death...his affairs are not neglected by the gods’ – implying something very close to a ‘divine law’1 permeating the destinies of men and ­annihilating all evil lies.2 A sense of genuine empowering follows from this attitude: Socrates has no fear in drinking the hemlock. He is defenceless against the injustice and baseness of other humans, yet also convinced of his indestructible nature.3 Further, in other dialogues, Plato repeatedly asserts the idea of the immortality of the soul (Phaedrus 245c; Phaedo 65a–67a, 72e–84b, 95a–107a), while Aristotle’s notion of metalepsis testifies to man’s consciousness of participating in the divine (Voegelin 1978). The Christian ethos sharpens this awareness, while also raising the stakes. With the divine becoming man the world is redeemed and made an eschatologically sin-free place with the right order of things always close at hand. However, the fragility of this newly found harmony expressed in the Trinitarian God also comes sharply into relief in the act of crucifixion. Historically, the belief in the resurrection of Christ becomes the pivotal axis of this harmony with political modernity emerging, in certain ways, as the spiritual rejection of Christ’s divine gift and sacrifice.4 A secular age is instead put

54  Camil Francisc Roman into place, one in which exclusive humanism makes human flourishing solely dependent on the action of human beings and especially on the premise of negating epistemologically any participatory ontology (Taylor 1995, 2007). Political order is thus disconnected from meaning and the problem of the order of the soul, so central to both classical and Christian philosophy (Voegelin 1978, 1987, 2000). In this new reality, Hobbes’s sovereign develops as a liminal ‘intermediary machine’, with modern political order losing both the quality of being ‘natural’ and ‘divine’, thus fixing time into the paradoxical realm of non-becoming.5 Accordingly, modern social life asserts itself as a matter of entirely artificial constructs all but overlapping with technology as an existential principle of order. This technological mindset6 discloses one essential feature: it is constituted by a boundless desire of domination. In the present chapter, this libido dominandi is theorized as a specific configuration of the self – the derivative self – seeking or willing to assert itself against the world. Therefore, instead of recognizing that human beings act within the world because they participate in it, the derivative self assumes the world itself has to be changed, from the outside, as it were, in a narrative of human progress and emancipation from nature, God (the divine) and tradition. This new attitude is of course religious in its own ways as our anthropological conditionality provides for the following inescapable given: human movement ultimately always postulates some direction, and thus purpose and meaning that in turn constitute an axiological orientation, or the worship of sacred value (Wydra 2015a).7 Part of the modern engagement with the world is also a genuine anthropological shift, starting with the Enlightenment, from a focus on past and present experiences (in the horizon of religious hopes regarding the salvation of the souls), to an existential investment in the expectation of a future radically beyond or against experience because founded on a continuous break with the past (Koselleck 2004). Squeezed in between these two clutches (assertion against the world, mechanical destruction of the past),8 the present and with it the reality of the world itself are permanently devalued and destroyed, literally offered as a sacrifice for an imagined future progress. The nature of the world and life as gifts offered to humans for joyful caretaking is obscured. The consequence is a subversion of almost all and everything, with the transformation of anthropos and the world into a ‘standing reserve’ of the technological process (Heidegger 1993a). As indicated in the introduction to the volume under the notion ‘paradox of power’, the point is not that subversion simply destroys political order but that it is instantiated in its own double: a political order of generalized disempowerment both effecting and reflecting the waning of a meaningful human life and the creation of weak, vacillating, aimless characters. The question arises as to what is the experiential background to this new type of engagement with the world? What is the derivative self made of? How did Max Weber’s ‘steel (c)age’ of disenchantment become at all possible?9 In answering this question, the chapter will focus on subversion

Subversion as divinizing the void  55 understood as a practice of divinizing the void, bringing a contribution to the thesis of modernity as ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai 2000). In the following, the void refers to two connected meanings. On the one hand, the emergence of the modern as a non-participatory ontology is taken as ‘inner void’, wherein the experience of emptiness becomes foundational and is translated in ontological terms as ultimate nothingness or the assumption that divine power either does not exist or is not active/effective within the world. Whenever I am engaging the history of modern philosophy in order to highlight the rise of the modern, I refer primarily to this first meaning. On the other hand, this inner void is related to an external or ‘outer void’ (as they mutually constitute each other) in which whatever exists as a visible tangible object and has form is not seen as ultimately real. Conversely, only the void understood as the invisible, formless part of nature (i.e. the air) has true reality. In this sense, the outer void becomes a script about objects and beings given for personal consumption (destruction) in order to effect a personal unnatural growth process. This script therefore subverts the reality of forms by transforming it into a state of permanent flux. Whenever I highlight the activity and effects of the derivative self, I refer to this second meaning. The modern as ethos of the void guiding the derivative self captures both developments, hence the claim about the ‘divinization of the void’ by anthropos. Following a political anthropological approach, the concepts of liminality and schismogenesis will be explained and used to capture the basic terms of our experience of subversion. While the chapter cannot provide a full genealogical reconstruction of the concrete historical, social, political, economic or philosophical-theological sources of modern subversion, it is nevertheless essential to pin down the anthropological modality in which an insidious form of nothingness enters reality, being then moved and ‘infinitely’ multiplied by subverted characters.10 The energy behind the unnatural growth of the derivative self is identified here as the ‘will to self-interest’. This does not refer to the natural inclination of simply taking care of oneself and aspiring to a meaningful life but to the manifestation of an active interest in the self and his/her assertion as the only real measure left in the world once the void becomes a foundational experience. The future opens up as a self-interested project. It is the imitative and contagious logic of self-interest that inserts secondary (artificial) powers into the world by fluidifying existing forms (be they objects, beings, political communities) through their unification with the void, in the hope of asserting temporary advantage. The will to self-­ interest is therefore understood as the annihilation of positionality between external forms through their absorption into the inner void. To the purpose of substantiating these claims, the chapter will ascertain the way in which the ‘modern’ surfaced at a spiritual level as an ethos of the void, or the logic of formless subversion which pushed to its last conclusion, cannot mean but the obliteration of the world. In pure genealogical spirit though relying also on comparative conceptual tools from cultural anthropology, the chapter will do this by looking at the birth of modern European

56  Camil Francisc Roman thought and politics as problematic schismogenic developments. Relying on the work of Gregory Bateson (1936), the chapter will make the case that such schismogeneses always break down a previously existing social unit making instead the experience of liminality, understood as the condition of permanent flux and transitoriness, the paradoxical unreal foundation for reality, truth and meaning. In what follows I link the modern schismogenesis to the way in which the Christian ethos of life was dismantled by tearing faith and reason apart. At the level of thought, the separation of faith and reason means that their schismatic existence is grounded in the pretence of ontological ‘purity’. The consequence of such a move was a type of reason exchanging the Christian father with nothingness, or the liminal void. At the level of politics, the process of splitting reason from faith was reflected by the replacement of polities linked to the Christian sacred, with what Claude Lefort called the ‘empty place of power’ of liberal democracy (1988). As I will show, this empty place instantiates the schismatic and liminal reality of an entirely immanent but also formless and thus limitless sacred.

Faith and form: subversion and the modern denial of participatory ontology11 The relationship between faith and reason (and by extension knowledge) is the most fundamental tension running through the history of Christian thought. While Nietzsche saw this tension going back to classic philosophy, singling out Plato as the main culprit for bringing the two together for the first time (2002: 80–81), the point here is to enquire into the relationship between the Christian ethos of life and the emergence of the (European) modern as subversion. The birth, life and resurrection of Jesus as Christ command not simply faith but the natural and graceful co-emergence of faith and reason based precisely on the witnessed and acknowledged realness of this experience. In the New Testament, there are two fundamental passages elaborating on the theme of faith from the perspective of this resolved tension.12 In Hebrews (11:1) we are told that ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’. Further, in Matthew (17:20) we see Jesus himself addressing his disciples: ‘For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you’. While the first quote gravitates around the pole of reason and accounts for faith as the evidence of things unseen (in the sense of invisible, yet real), the second passage moves towards the pole of faith presenting it as evidence of impossible things seen or, in other words, as the embodiment of Jesus himself. The horizontal (human) and vertical (divine) of faith The Greek word for faith used in these passages refers to the noun pistis and the related verb pisteuo. In Greek mythology, Pistis appears as the personification of trust, being mentioned together with Sophrosyne (­restraint, prudence)

Subversion as divinizing the void  57 and the Charites (or Graces) as the gods who fled to heaven as soon as Pandora opened her box, abandoning humankind to impiety towards the gods (‘the race of pious men has perished’), disharmony and conflict (‘evil deeds’) and lies (the ‘crooked speech of unjust men’) (­Theognis 2003: 1135–1150). Pistis, however, is also prominent in ­Aristotle’s treatise on rhetoric, being at the heart of the field of tension bringing together anthropos, language, imagination and reality. For Aristotle, pistis encompasses both artistic means of persuasion, i.e. referring to the character of the speaker (ethos); the emotions of the audience (pathos) and truthful argument (logos); and non-artistic forms of persuasion, i.e. evidence is drawn on the basis of a witness or a written contract (Aristotle 1991). On a fundamental level, pistis is about defending truth and oneself, or conversely, about harming the same in case of misuse. The meaning and etymology of the English ‘faith’ point to several similar insights.13 First, and just as with the Greek version, the word encompasses overwhelmingly positive connotations as it relates to trust, loyalty, honesty, keeping promises, truth or truthfulness, and confidence. Equally, the absence of faith, or being faithless refers to insincerity and deception, clear indicators of situations of subversion in the sense of undermining things and pre-existing relations, turning them on their head.14 Second, faith also has the equally conventional understanding of belief in God, or religious piousness, a meaning that has come to dominate so much of our understanding of the term, being also the one responsible for faith’s disrepute following its purposeful modern epistemological trivialization. Yet, in this capacity as belief, we get additional insights as the PIE root for belief is leubh- or ‘to care, desire, love’, closing again the circle between the vertical (divine) and the horizontal (human) dimensions. The three hypostases of faith: voice of the heart, reason (truth) and form A close reflection on the meaning of these dimensions of faith leads to the following preliminary considerations. First, and following insights from Saint Augustine (2008) and Heidegger (1993b), both the vertical and the horizontal seem to point decisively towards the underlying nature of faith as an erotic charge produced by a clearing in which entities and their relations acquire a meaningful presence. In other words, faith emerges as the relational disposition of an encounter or an event (Goethe’s Erlebnis), as a (new) positionality that comes out of a liminal situation of opening towards the ground of existence. Yet the essential point about this disposition is that its reality can be actualized only through the truthful mediation between external forms and the inner self. This points towards the fact that faith is an entirely non-technological, invisible imprint, or the living inner image of a meaningfully witnessed reality. To put it simply, faith develops as the voice of the heart, as mediator between anthropos and forms, where anthropos is an insider to these forms and hence fundamentally oriented (erotically charged) towards their preservation.

58  Camil Francisc Roman Following from this, the second element implied in faith refers to being the existential source of right measure regarding the positionality of forms, the idea of care, desire and love, all shining through here. As such, faith appears indubitably connected to reason, following the etymological sense of ratio as something concerned with the right proportions, harmony and balance. In this sense, not only is reason not separable from faith as modernist philosophy and epistemology would have it, but in order for reason to be reason it has to have faith; otherwise the act of thinking becomes a source of irrationality, being incapable of establishing any meaningful (i.e. truthful) relationship between external forms and the self. Even more, this makes immediately transparent that truth itself, if it is to have any actual value and reality attached to it, can only be thought of as the act of seeing the right relationships between existing forms, hence always pointing towards the good. In my reading, for the late Heidegger clearing is connected to the Greek word aletheia both as unconcealment and truth, with aletheia meaning the ‘clearing of presence [unconcealment] concealing itself [truth]’ (1993b: 448). While faith as erotic charge emerges in aletheia as clearing, it seems that aletheia as truth is unthinkable without faith providing for the recognition of forms. Taking cues from Saint Augustine for whom the ‘specific gravity of a body is, as it were, its love’ and as such ‘a body is borne by gravity as a spirit by love, whichever way it is moved’ (2008: 232), faith’s erotic charge endows characters with a spirit which is nothing other than ‘love’, orienting them to their proper place in the order of nature, to truth and the good. Lastly, as an erotic charge aimed at caring for the truthful relationships between meaningfully encountered forms, faith constitutes one of the key ontological attributes of anthropos protecting the world from the development of self-interested characters. Here, self-interest is taken as a type of erratic assertion of will against external forms precisely because fundamentally unwilling of faith, with this unwillingness possibly falling back on the absence of erotic charges (Heidegger’s clearing). The consequence is a type of blindness to the right measure of one’s own life and therefore incapacity of understanding either good or evil, with evil standing for not knowing or accepting the limits of forms, being thus linked to liminality as a transgressive experience. This refers us back to the introduction, connecting ‘­t echnology – destruction of forms  – ­c onstruction’ with the development of the ‘self-interested characters’ adopting an outsider position to the world. It is scarcely a coincidence that at the moment in which Christian faith was increasingly under attack from scientific and enlightened reason, this same reason developed and sanctioned the political (Machiavelli; Hobbes), moral (Locke; Mill; Bentham), economic (Smith; Marx) and philosophical (Kant; Mill) idea of the self-interested character.15 Kant, for example, even links self-­ interested motives to perpetual peace, the highest state of beatitude in the

Subversion as divinizing the void  59 progressive handbook of paradise, with such peace being attainable even by ‘a nation of devils’, provided a liberal/republican constitution is in place (1991: 112). Unsurprisingly, capitalism and communism (socialism), the two instantiations of modernity’s philosophy of progress, constitute the henceforth mutually reinforcing soteriologies of the self-­i nterested character working towards the absorption of external forms into the inner void.16 In this sense, the only political reality of modernity is economic life, itself facing not the dilemma of presumably opposing alternatives between communism/socialism and capitalism but the spectre of their asymptotic unification. The cross of faith: bringing the horizontal and vertical together through Max Weber’s loss of ‘chords’ At this point we need to deal with faith and its relationship to natural form and participatory ontology. For this purpose, the Latin word fides gives us final clues, providing also for an unlikely link to Max Weber. This is so because fides refers not only to faith but also to the chords or strings of a musical instrument, immediately bringing to mind Weber’s famous and most quoted self-description as a person who is religiously ‘absolut unmusikalisch’ (Weber 1994: 65). Yet, rather than assimilating the lack of faith in God or the divine as ground for self-congratulatory attitudes in the modern spirit of progress and dislocation from a discarded past, Weber was painstakingly aware that, far from being natural, this amounted to the condition of a cripple (Krüppel), of a person broken to pieces (verstümmelter Mensch). Drawing on Gertrud Simmel, the metaphor Weber uses to depict his crippled condition is a ‘tree stump’ (Baumstumpf ) (1994: 63–66). Simmel’s point is that in the process of growing, a tree can either remain one with itself or incorporate forms that are alien to it, even negating it (1994: 65, fn5). In other words, her observation captures the logic of a subverted existence, exactly in the senses used in this volume and chapter, as a process of unnatural growth, a perverted liminal matrix (see Chapter 1), mushrooming construction and corrupted forms. The inspiration of Weber as a philosopher concerned with the anthropological process of depersonalization and alienation in the context of modern life (Hennis 1988) lies precisely in keeping united the horizontal and vertical aspects of faith, and thus (un)wittingly pinning down the three key elements of the modern subversion of forms. First, there is the ‘absence of faith’ in both its dimensions, hence the dogmatic refusal of participation and the impossibility of clearing. Second, there is ‘existence as a tree stump’, which refers to the condition of immobility, to the absence of natural growth and movement, the fixation into liminality.17 Lastly, there is ‘no prayer’, indicating existential closure towards the care of the self in its relationship to meaningfully encountered forms. This latter aspect is not explicitly mentioned by Weber but is implicitly present and has to be singled out almost by default as it falls back on the void, or the idea of a world in

60  Camil Francisc Roman which there is no divine power. Conversely, a natural and thus un-subverted form of human existence is situated in the tightly interconnected topos of ‘faith-walking/natural growth-prayer’.18 Participatory ontology: discovering the indestructible within as link between the divine and natural form While the aforementioned establishes the phenomenological relationship between faith, form, truth and participatory ontology, two problems can be raised. First, faith in its historical phenomenological givenness can also incorporate corrupted forms and hence realities already under subversion, making the distinction between natural form and construction that much harder to determine, even making such determination impossible. Second, none of this actually ‘proves’ in any way a participatory ontology in the stricter sense of the existence of the divine or God, much less of a revealed Christian God in history. Considering the latter point, this chapter indeed cannot ‘prove’ the existence of the divine, which in certain ways, if we are absolutely serious about it, cannot be but a playful and/or ironical endeavour,19 very little related to the positivist idea of evidence based discourse. Insofar as the divine is real, either in the sense of classical philosophy as an eternal realm of eidos or in the religious sense of a revealed God in history, the key point about this realness is precisely the impossibility of catching it and locking it up behind a few sentences, no matter how well grounded.20 Both Plato’s ‘divine’ and Jesus’s life speak to the same fact: neither of them are directly codifiable, always requiring a dialogue with them (Gadamer 2006; Pleşu 2012). Therefore, the claim made here is that the modernist separation between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of faith does not in fact work out, except by anthropos becoming exactly ‘modern’. This is to say that the separation can be rationalized only by normalizing subversion as standard of reality, thus making oneself an insider to the liminalizing logic of formlessness and looking at the world not with the divine but through the lens of the void, the nothingness. Concluding on this point, with the divine in essential ways beyond grasp, the central aspect of faith is that it is indissoluble: while it is born in metaxy, the in-betweenness of the human condition in the tension towards the divine (Voegelin 1967), faith does not belong to the liminal flux; it cannot be cognitively or conceptually liquefied in basic ontological parts. It is this rock solid nature of faith that cannot be broken, nor reduced to smaller substitutes, which must be linked to the recognition of the indestructible in our soul. While a discussion of the indestructible is beyond the scope of this chapter, in recent literature it has to be related to Horvath’s anthropology of ‘first power’ (2019) and Szakolczai’s sociology of the contemporary (2016, 2017). The indestructible means that the soul cannot be changed, altered or transformed by any external force; however,

Subversion as divinizing the void  61 and in line with Augustinian theology, it can be given up through personal consent (Szakolczai, 2019). In this sense, the conscience of the indestructibility of the soul can never be more than the faith in the indestructibility of the soul, constituting the clearing of a participatory ontology, and therefore discovering the existence of the divine, of natural forms, and their relationships to each other. It is this fine and very delicate balance between faith, form, participatory ontology, reason and truth that characterizes the Christian ethos and that early modern experiences of social liminality substituted with the void, or the logic of subversion and formlessness. The rest of the chapter cannot do more than providing some essential glimpses into this process. Given their analytical and interpretative importance, at this point a more explicit presentation of liminality and schismogenesis is needed.

Liminality and schismogenesis Liminality goes back to Arnold van Gennep’s idea of rites of passage (1909/1960). Rites of passage refer to a period of transformative transition for individuals and communities, being marked by clear entry and exit points guided by a master of ceremony. They have a tripartite structure, being made of rites of separation from one’s daily life, liminal rites of performance or proving oneself in front of the community, and finally rites of reintegration in which the passage is complete, the initiand and the community being reunited within a new order of being. Examples of such rituals range from weddings to passages to adulthood. Moving from an anthropological setting to a social theoretical use of the concept, such ordered rituals can encompass modern societies at large as, for example, in the process of democratic elections. Further, liminality can also capture the in-between of periods of transition as provided by moments of social crises, where no masters of ceremony are present to guide the process. In this sense, liminality refers to the recognition that history is not linear but marked by moments of radical contingency that are themselves highly unstructured and simultaneously produce lasting effects. Yet these unguided reintegrations into social order are highly problematic situations with never a guarantee of success, always presenting the risk of fixating society and individuals into permanent liminality, or the condition of continuous flux and transitoriness.21 The concept schismogenesis has its source in Gregory Bateson’s fieldwork on the Iatmul society and his attempt of trying to understand the very troubling and violent nature of the social interactions in these Iatmul communities (1936). According to him, schismogenesis refers to processes of communication through which a previous social unity gets broken but the separated components are forced to stay together, ‘normalizing’ even extremely unpleasant conditions of life and behaviour. The situation described by ­Bateson is similar to the one found in modern European societies in as much as, once some form of social unity is broken, it is difficult to leave the rest

62  Camil Francisc Roman of society behind by simple separation. From this perspective, the modern emerges as a schismogenic process within historical Christianity and the essential point here is to understand its exact significance.

The schismogenesis of modern thought The best way to illustrate the problem at the level of thought is by contrasting the figures of Saint Augustine and René Descartes with a view to ascertaining their animating spirit. There are a number of good reasons why the comparison between the two men is useful for our analysis. First, they provide two diametrically opposed ways of dealing with the constitutive tension of the Christian ethos, embodying therefore two ideal type figures of historical Christianity: while Augustine reasons with faith, Descartes ultimately asserts faith in (his) reason alone. Second, as both figures constitute key focal points of major historical developments, their relevance cannot be emphasized enough. Augustine is one of the most important theologians and philosophers formulating a new spiritual disposition that in basic symbolic terms characterized the emerging Christian era for more than a millennium, his influence waning (no coincidence) only in the 17th century. René Descartes counts as the first truly modern philosopher both reflecting and articulating a new vision of the world picked up and further elaborated by his successors, being directly relevant to our discussion at hand. Third, and as a methodological point, the philosophical text-internal comparison between Augustine and Descartes stands in a long tradition of scholarship (Gouhier 1978; Wilson 2008). Concerning this last methodological point, the present chapter follows a different path as the larger discussion regards the ontological grounding of their thought, or how the experience of liminality impacted their animating spirit. Applying the notion of liminality to the history of thought has been undertaken before (Szakolczai 2009) and in relation to Descartes himself (Thomassen 2014: 113–139). As such, the ­purpose here is to emphasize the experiential sources of their thought, ­using the gained insights as diagnostic tools for understanding the present (­Voegelin 1978). In such a view, thought and consciousness are themselves part of the historical process, producing symbolizations that have to be connected to real-life experiences and their engendering conditions. The Christian ethos: Saint Augustine and René Descartes To start with, both authors lived through ages of ‘great confusion’,22 being characterized by fluid conditions and the radical uncertainty and anxiety of genuinely experienced crises. Augustine’s life span coincided with the ­galvanization of Western antiquity, with the ‘barbaric invasions’ of the ­Italian peninsula and their culmination in the sack of Rome, in 410. Once the eternal pillar of the world, Rome’s invasion clearly signalled that ­nothing could be taken for granted anymore (Brown 2000: esp. 285–296). In the case

Subversion as divinizing the void  63 of Descartes, the 17th century marks the end of the Christian era with early modernity emerging from the debris of the ‘religious wars’ as a threshold period with far reaching consequences (Voegelin 1998). In short, these ages were characterized by large-scale liminal conditions of life, making necessary an existential effort at understanding. In this context, both Augustine and Descartes have formulated a new kind of anthropology of the self, only that, while Augustine found a way out of liminality, by bringing faith and reason together in a participatory ontology, Descartes remained imprisoned in the liminal, becoming thus in a literal sense a spectre refracting forms into liminalized pieces. In the City of God, the opus conceived as a direct response to the invasion of Rome, Augustine moves towards an understanding of the self that resembles the divine Trinity. According to him, human beings have inscribed in their soul, beyond any ‘shadow of illusion to disturb us’, a trinity of being, knowledge and love. As he puts it, ‘we are, and we know that we are, and we love to be and to know that we are’ (2008: 228). This absolute certainty speaking up to our inner essence is founded not on the testimony of others but on ‘our interior and unerring vision’ (2008: 233).23 Starting with faith and reason, Saint Augustine reaches the inner and external image or idea of form.24 Taken word by word, this provides the exact opposite of Descartes’s formulations on the self. As the story goes and is well known, Descartes chose to emphasize not the absolute certainty of one’s being alive, but the radical doubt over any kind of apparent certainty, including the existence of the self (Wilson 2008: 34). He begins his Meditations on First Philosophy by questioning whether anything in the world really exists or is true, except maybe for the doubting of reality. Ultimately, only by postulating the existence of God can any rational certainty about the world be achieved again (Descartes 1998). Descartes’s way of proceeding is doubly liminal: not only does he anchor his thought in the key emotions of anxiety and doubt, themselves central to the liminal experience, but the technique used by Descartes to reach the ground of a new universal truth closely corresponds to the structure of the ritual passage (Thomassen 2014: 120–121). In other words, Descartes is using liminality as a technology of the self, in which he is both an initiand and the master of ceremonies. First, the rite of separation is clearly marked in Descartes’s desire to simply erase all previously established knowledge. Second, the liminal or middle rite is mirrored in the cogito, or the ‘new identity’ that Descartes performs by immediately putting it to test. Finally, the rite of integration is achieved by Descartes’s elaboration of a new system of knowledge through which, after repeated tests, the world is made ‘whole’ or certain again. The foundation of truth lies here with the universal reason discovered in the individual ‘thinking’ self. As Thomassen points out, Descartes, as the creator of the ‘sovereign self’, is the contemporaneous exact mirror image of Hobbes’s ‘sovereign state’, both being essential ways of instituting modernity (2014: 115). Yet the crucial aspect to grasp here is that this sovereign self rises by tearing apart the Christian ethos, substituting it with the ultimate nothingness, which is why, following the interpretation

64  Camil Francisc Roman offered in this chapter, the emphasis must fall on the nature of this character as a divinizer of the void, giving birth to the derivative self. At this point we can contrast again the two authors singled out for attention, specifying further what is involved in the emergence of the derivative self. Saint Augustine starts out from a balanced embrace between faith and reason, reaches the inner and external image of form, and opens his soul to a participatory ontology in which the logic of existence is linked to the fundamental care of those forms, with truth being connected to the dispositional relationship between them. Descartes advances from a dogmatic denial of faith (its systematic ontological and epistemological devaluation), drives a lasting wedge between faith and reason (which in effect means an absolute faith in reason and a devaluation of emotion), reaches the closure of the inner self into a derivative entity and finally adopts the formlessness of an ultimately non-participatory ontology (despite rhetorical assurances to the contrary). Henceforth, the truth and knowledge of reality emanates from the truth and knowledge of the derivative self who is hermetically closed towards the metaxological outside because its ‘universality’ is by necessity disjunct from any dispositional relationship inside the world. Thus, the locomotion of the derivative self cannot be constituted but by the logic of self-­ interest asserting itself against the world. The fact that self-interest is directly connected to subversion, the void and divinization, can be emphasized by following the etymology of ‘interest’. Coming from the Latin ‘inter-essere’, interest designates the space or the mediation between two characters as it relates to their constitutive encounters (Wydra 2015a: 55). Judged against this background, self-interest acts as the absorption of the free and open space into the inner void. In this way, it is the destruction of positionality through secondary powers, providing for a process of unification into a liminalizing flux or wave and hence transforming reality into formlessness. The bitter struggles between Protestantism and Catholicism provided the backdrop for Descartes’s development of the derivative self. His emphasis on reason underlying the entire project of modern philosophy can be read in this context as the schismogenic double of the Protestant stress on faith over praxis. The two positions, each striving for ‘purity’, were henceforth existentially complicit and mutually fatal. Much like the opposition between the religious and the secular, the issue is not simply to point towards two different modes of thinking but rather to single out their mutual determination. The best way to approach this is by looking at Kant, the philosopher who managed to bring faith and reason together, not in the sense of the form of the previous ­Christian ethos but in the sense of the void, fixating modern thought in the liminal. Immanuel Kant: reason and faith (re-)united in the void – from form to construction25 While Kant’s transcendental philosophy overcame Descartes’s rationalism in philosophical terms, the technology of the self that Descartes initiated was

Subversion as divinizing the void  65 fully taken over by Kant. In this sense, Kant too follows the ontology of the derivative self, feeling thus compelled to bring order in a universe of chaos and enlighten it with his universal reason. Similar with Descartes, Kant’s biography was steeped both in the discourse of modern natural ­philosophy and in the insider experience of a religious background (Schönfeld and Thompson 2014). However, given the advantage of historical hindsight, Kant was much more acutely aware than Descartes regarding the entanglement between faith and reason and the necessity of keeping some sort of balance between the two. In the preface to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant openly states that he had ‘to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’ (Kant 1998: 117). To this end, Kant’s critical philosophy follows the method of the transcendental argument which he develops in two steps. First, the philosopher enquires into the a priori conditions for the possibility of human experience and establishes the ontology of humans as natural ‘bodies’, standardized in terms of the other bodies of the universe. Second, once human subjects have been secured as natural bodies, the transcendental argument is expanded to ascertain the truth of all human affairs, from politics to morality, religion, history and law (Kant 1987, 1991, 2002, 2009). In these writings, Kant constructs a discourse of knowledge in which truth is claimed to be ontologically independent of any substantive references to historically and/or empirically grounded experience. Rather than starting from the concrete and discovering the positionality of forms in relation to each other, Kant denies the concrete outrightly in order to construct the ‘universal’. Proceeding in this way, the paradox and strength of the Kantian framework is that the philosopher succeeds in uniting faith with scientific rationality, though the paid price is excessively high: the real and its forms remain inscrutable, clearing the way for the void. The exact links between Kant’s pure reason, universality, the void and subversion can now be illustrated by bringing attention to one of the most important and yet essentially overlooked passages of his entire opus: But so long as they do not have the force of certainty, I cannot exchange my duty (as a liquidum) for a rule of expediency which says that I ought not to attempt the impracticable (i.e. an illiquidum, since it is purely hypothetical). (1991: 89)26 This passage appears in a larger discussion Kant is making regarding the pre-eminence of pure reason over practice and experience in dealing with issues of general morality, domestic and international politics. It claims that it is the categories of pure reason (the moral duty and the moral law) that can determine truth and the real nature of any historically given circumstance and experience. Most importantly, and following Kant’s self-confession, the source of pure reason lies in the liquidum; it is where the derivative self has to situate itself in order to see the truth and achieve history’s ultimate ends.

66  Camil Francisc Roman In this logic, everything that is formless (liquid) is real and absolutely true, while everything that is concrete and has form is unreal and hypothetical. I consider this passage to be the clearest formulation of the metaphysics of the liminal void in Kant’s work. Here faith and modern rationality are united in the liminal flux of infinite transmutability, which becomes the foundation of reality, shifting thought from the discovery of forms in their positionality (via faith), to mere construction (forms are inscrutable). Paradoxically, the only foundation of truth and knowledge, and the ultimate reality of all, becomes the liminal void; in this way, universal reason hooks up with the zero.

The schismogenesis of modern politics The modern schismogenic process breaking up the Christian ethos and substituting it with the ethos of the void can be pinned down not only at the level of thought symbolizations but also in the rise of modern politics. With the emergence of modern democracy, the symbolic representation of human existence occurs through the ‘empty place of power’ (Lefort 1988). This refers to the fact that ‘the locus of power is an empty place, it cannot be o ­ ccupied – it is such that no individual and no group can be consubstantial with it – and it cannot be represented’ (1988: 17). Consequently, the essence of modern democracy is that it has no essence: it is not bound to any metaphysical, ­religious, transcendental principle or to any certainty or substantive identity. Rather, modern democracy strives for pure self-­i mmanence (1988: 225–226). As the most important founding myth of political m ­ odernity, the French Revolution played a key role in this evolution, being also the first time in European history when the liminal void – Lefort’s empty place of power – was enacted politically and symbolized in actual reality. In this sense, the French Revolution constitutes the political consecration of the derivative self. The French Revolution as a permanent ritual passage The idea that major social crises like wars and revolutions, or the rise of modern democracy, can be analyzed and interpreted as liminal ritual moments has been convincingly argued (Thomassen 2012; Wydra 2015b) and recently applied in a comprehensive manner to the study of the French Revolution itself (Roman 2017). In this context, there are two essential points that for the purposes of this chapter need to be highlighted. First, the French Revolution is not simply a liminal experience in the sense of a transitory situation in which wider social structures collapse and are re-invented. Rather, the revolution becomes the liminal as its central cardinal values – ‘freedom, equality, brotherhood’ – express the ritual passage (Szakolczai 2008: 209, fn.5). ‘Freedom’ corresponds to the suspension of norms and institutions characteristic of the first phase of the rite of passage; ‘equality’ describes the relationships between the initiands of communitas as captured in the

Subversion as divinizing the void  67 second phase of the ritual; and ‘fraternity’ refers to the communitas itself, as created by the ritual in the third re-integrating phase. Second, in as much as these values have become the measuring rod for the critique and the epistemological understanding of modern democracy, the offered interpretation points to the fact that modern democracy can exist only as a continuous movement, thus not as democracy but as permanent democratization. This can be illustrated by further indicating what is actually involved in making these central liminal values the sacred core of democratic existential representation. The idea here is that they constitute together the mechanics of a flux insinuating itself as the nature of reality. This flux comes into being because nobody can ever be brought in the equivalent position of equality, freedom and solidarity in relation to everybody else, except in the hypothetical situation where characters lose any personal quality of their own, referring not simply to an absolute state of social undifferentiation (in itself ultimately impossible) but also to the complete absence of any content or personal form (equally ultimately impossible).27 Consequently, the logic of permanent democratization, left on its own, is nothing other than the artificial creation of movement, a mechanical perpetuum mobile whose kinetic energy is created by unifying characters with the void, further reinforcing flux. Yet the more one destroys the positionality of fixed forms, the more the emptiness of the flux becomes visible from within. It turns on itself. The schismogenic process of the French Revolution: from the sacrifice of the Christian father to the birth of the limitless sacred28 That every political entity is bound with the sacred, that indeed politics and the sacred are simply inseparable, is a well-grounded anthropological fact (Wydra 2015a). In regard to the French Revolution, the problem is trying to understand the type of sacred that was instantiated and taken over by Western modern liberal democracies. Two arguments have to be made in this context. First, the key to the issue lies with the symbolic and existential aspects involved in the execution of Louis XVI (Roman 2015). As a religious symbol of power, Louis XVI was still bound to the idea of the sanctity of power, following the older medieval pursuit of saintliness underlying the Christian conduct of life (Vauchez 2005). Not only was Louis XVI’s kingship tied up in its ritual representation of power to the worship of God (Caiani 2012) but through a rather unlikely coincidence of history, the French king himself was living in Imitatio Christi, especially observable in his overall engagement with the revolution in the last months of his life (Roman 2017). On an anthropological level, this means that the king’s Imitatio Christi was linked to an anti-sacrificial logic of (non-) action, in particular regarding situations of large-scale social crisis that are conducive to scapegoating mechanisms (Girard 1979, 1986). Second, the revolutionary sacrificial violence culminating in the immolation of a king, who was both a symbol of religious power and a self-conscious imitator of Christ, discloses important features

68  Camil Francisc Roman of the emerging democratic sacred. On one level, this sacred was and continues to be enacted not simply against religion per se but specifically against the Christian sacred. The sacrifice of Louis XVI, as Camus (2000) clearly realized, represents the historical sacrifice of the Christian father, the dematerialization of the Christian God in history. Going therefore beyond the misleading language of abstract rights following the legal privatization of religion, from a political anthropological perspective the French Revolution constitutes the historical mediation for a modern democratic polity whose very sacred core is a rite of passage celebrating the immolation of the Christian father. On another level, this new democratic sacred presents us with the paradoxical nature of non-substantiality. In other words, as an empty place of power symbolizing the ‘two bodies of the people’ – the people as one and the people as a fragmented sociological reality (Wydra 2015b) – the democratic sacred lacks an essence or form. This, however, does not make it any less effective or present. Rather, it implies the substitution of the Christian with a limitless sacred, thus bringing us back to the phenomenon of subversion and flux as the sacred as zero can now take any content, depending on the people’s underlying objects of desire. With such desires essentially insatiable (Girard 1976), the modern democratic sacred provides the frame for the derivative self and its limitless pursuit of immanence, opening the doors out wide for the wholesale consumption and subversion of the world.

Conclusion Existence under subversion means acting out a life in bad faith, with each future-oriented action being forced into the steel coat of self-interest. This not only undermines the foundations of one’s own existence but also undermines those of everybody else’s, systematically distorting human relations, real value and criteria of life conduct, introducing the regency of secondary powers over the world and contributing to its unmistakable destruction. Such powers both require and mime what Voegelin (1999: 102–105, citing Carl Amery) called the petit bourgeois ‘secondary virtues’ of ‘Anstand’: not being bound to any ultimate ends or values only renders the lethal side of such virtues (i.e. honesty, punctuality, diligence, cleanliness, reliability in service, obedience to authority, etc.) more invisible but not the least bit less effective. A life lived in bad faith also means to never be present at the rendezvous with your own life. The unnatural self-aggrandizement achieved through self-interest subverts the idea and reality of destiny. As the natural growing into form, destiny is rejected by the derivative self for a fundamentally self-deceiving emotion of empowerment. Yet living under subversion essentially means to become part of a flux and cast onto oneself the shadows of the void: confusion, disorientation, immobility, anxiety, doubt, the lies of crooked speech, the freezing into project, the experience of time deprived of the fullness of being, the heartless irrationalization of reason, the dislocation of the real through the imaginary, the closed-eyes leap into lunacy. In

Subversion as divinizing the void  69 the liminal flux, any act of power exerted over others is an act of subverting one’s own power. If personal and communal power is to have any meaningful presence to anthropos, it has to stay clear of subversion. This can only involve one thing: living in good faith, growing into natural form and seeing the manifold possibilities of destiny.

Notes 1 Reading this passage with Saint Augustine: God is the ruler of ‘evil wills’, turning them into good purposes (2008: 213–214). 2 It is interesting how the last work of Plato –The Laws – returns also to the last section of what is presumably Plato’s first dialogue –The Apology –specifically to the unspoken or unnamed but clearly present idea of a ‘divine law’. 3 Further down, the chapter introduces the indestructible as the key element of a participatory ontology. 4 This has also been the long-standing intuition of some of the most important ­novels of the modern age, from their very beginning with Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Szakolczai 2016). 5 As will become clear during this chapter, this means two essential aspects. First, it does not refer to the annihilation of history but rather to its acceleration through the constant injection of the void into social experience. Second, and more fundamental, it means that human beings’ natural growth into form is stunted, hence the aimless floating into non-becoming. 6 See Chapters 1 and 2. 7 See Chapter 8. 8 For an excellent account of the trickster’s transformation process of human beings, see Chapter 9. 9 This is a play of words on Weber’s famous ‘iron cage’, or more literally, ‘cage hard as steel’ metaphor (‘stahlhartes Gehäuse’) describing the reality of contemporary capitalism (2016: 171). 10 On the empty space, or the void, see for example also Plato’s idea of the khora, in Timaeus; and Marc Augé’s anthropology of modern non-places (1995). 11 For the remainder of the chapter, all sections are marked by titles in bold, whereas subsections are marked by titles in bold italics. 12 The following New Testament quotes are retrieved from www.biblegateway. com, to be found in the King James Version of the Bible. 13 The following presentation of the English ‘faith’ has made use of the Online ­Etymological Dictionary (www.etymonline.com). 14 See Chapter 9. 15 No doubt specialists will much quibble over such a simplification regarding the exact role ‘self-interest’ plays in the thought of the various mentioned thinkers, and how much it weighs in their overall views of individuals and human societies, especially in comparison to each other. Nevertheless, and going beyond such nuances (that in any case, very often are of no actual content, being related to mere rhetorical traps set consciously or unconsciously by the authors themselves), it seems certain that the entire modern political theory of the social contract, with all the political, social, economic, philosophical and moral consequences that arise from it, both at the level of thought and practice, is postulated on the rationalist and utilitarian understanding of human beings in the sense of the self-interested anthropos. 16 See Chapters 8 and 9. 17 On the ‘fixation into liminality’, see especially Chapters 1 and 9.

70  Camil Francisc Roman 18 On connections between the three, see Gros (2014), Roman (2014) and the recent, most comprehensive treatment of walking by Horvath and Szakolczai (2018). 19 See Plato’s Phaedrus on the impossibility of capturing reality in words. 20 The trickster can pretend to resemble God, even to be one, but it cannot catch God in its rational net which would amount to essentially reversing the order of things! In ultimate terms, mystery, just as reality, cannot be fully overcome, it is. 21 For excellent, state-of-the-art expositions of the concept of liminality, see the volumes by Thomassen (2014) and Horvath, Wydra and Thomassen (eds) (2015). 22 According to Voegelin’s terminology regarding the rise of early modernity between the mid-16th to mid-17th century (1998). 23 Italics added by the author of this chapter. 24 There is much more to highlight in Augustine’s formulations on the self. However, for the purposes of this chapter, this brief exposition is sufficient to capture the essential difference between him and Descartes, while also remaining faithful to the letter and spirit of Augustine. 25 Certain parts of this section have appeared in a similar version in Roman (2018). 26 The emphases are added by the author of this chapter. 27 Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how, starting with the 20th century, precisely such a state of affairs has been identified and denounced in Ortega y Gasset’s book on the ‘mass society’ (1993) or in Musil’s novel on the man without qualities (1995). 28 Certain parts of this section have appeared in a similar version in Roman (2018).

Bibliography Aristotle (1991) On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London: Verso. Augustine (2008) The City of God, Books VIII-XVI, Washington, DC: Catholic ­University of America Press. Bateson, Gregory (1936) Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bible (2018) King James Version, online version at www.biblegateway.com/versions/ King-James-Version-KJV-Bible/#booklist (Accessed 20 March 2018). Brown, Peter (2000) Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Caiani, Ambrogio A. (2012) Louis XVI and the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Camus, Albert (2000) The Rebel, London: Penguin Books. Descartes, René (1998) ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Eliade, Mircea (1987) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York: Harcourt. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (2006) Truth and Method, London: Continuum. Gennep, Arnold van (1960) The Rites of Passage, London: Routledge. Girard, René (1976) Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——— (1979) Violence and the Sacred, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——— (1986) The Scapegoat, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Subversion as divinizing the void  71 Gouhier, Henri (1978) Cartésianisme et Augustinianisme aux XVII siècle, Paris: J. Vrin. Gros, Frédéric (2014) A Philosophy of Walking, London: Verso. Heidegger, Martin (1993a) ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in D.F. Krell (ed) Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, New York: HarpersCollins. ——— (1993b) ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, in D.F. Krell (ed) Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, New York: HarpersCollins. Hennis, Wilhelm (1988) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, London: Allen and Unwin. Horvath, Agnes (2019) ‘Charisma/Trickster: On the Twofold Nature of Power’, in H. Wydra and B. Thomassen (eds) Handbook of Political Anthropology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Horvath, Agnes and Szakolczai, Arpad (2018) Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, New York: Routledge. Horvath, Agnes, Thomassen, Bjorn, and Wydra, Harald (eds) (2015) Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Oxford: Berghahn. Kant, Immanuel (1987) Critique of Judgment, Cambridge: Hackett. ——— (1991) Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2002) Critique of Practical Reason, Cambridge: Hackett. ——— (2009) Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Cambridge: Hackett. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia University Press. Lefort, Claude (1988) Democracy and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1975) The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, New York: Harper. Musil, Robert (1995) The Man without Qualities, vols. 1 and 2, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2002) Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ortega y Gasset, José (1993) The Revolt of the Masses, London: W.W. Norton. Plato (1997) Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett. Pleșu, Andrei (2012) Parabolele lui Isus: Adevărul ca poveste, Bucharest: Humanitas. Roman, Camil Francisc (2014) ‘Walking and Praying into the Condition of the Witness: Steps Towards a Non-Sacrificial Philosophical Anthropology’, International Political Anthropology 7, 2: 59–78. ——— (2015) ‘Liminality, the Execution of Louis XVI and the Rise of Terror during the French Revolution’, in A. Horvath, B. Thomassen, and H. Wydra (eds) Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Oxford: Berghahn. ——— (2017) The French Revolution as a Liminal Process: Towards a Political Anthropology of Radical Social Changes, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge. ——— (2018) ‘The French Revolution and the Craft of the Liminal Void: From the Sanctity of Power to the Political Power of the Limitless Sacred’, Historical Sociology: A Journal of Historical Social Sciences 10, 1: 71–91. Schönfeld, Martin and Thompson, Michael (2014) Kant’s Philosophical Development, online version at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-development/ (­Accessed 12 February 2016). Szakolczai, Arpad (2000) Reflexive Historical Sociology, London: Routledge. ——— (2008) ‘The Spirit of the Nation-State: Nation, Nationalism and InnerWorldly Eschatology in the Work of Eric Voegelin’, International Political Anthropology 1, 2: 193–212.

72  Camil Francisc Roman ——— (2009) ‘Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Trasnformative Events’, International Political Anthropology 2, 1: 141–172. ——— (2016) Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary, London: Routledge ——— (2017) Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels, London: Routledge. ——— (2019) ‘Recovering the Classical Foundations of Political Anthropology’, in H. Wydra and B. Thomassen (eds) Handbook of Political Anthropology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Taylor, Charles (1995) Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (2007) A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Theognis (2003) ‘Theognis: Text’, in D.G. Gerber (ed) Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomassen, Bjørn (2012) ‘Notes Towards an Anthropology of Political Revolutions’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 3: 679–706. ——— (2014) Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between, Farnham: Ashgate. Vauchez, André (2005) Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voegelin, Eric (1967) ‘Immortality: Experience and Symbol’, The Harvard Theological Review 60, 3: 235–279. ——— (1978) Anamnesis, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ——— (1987) The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ——— (1998) Religion and the Rise of Modernity, vol. 5 of History of Political Ideas: The Collected works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 23, Colombia: University of Missouri Press. ——— (1999) Hitler and the Germans: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 31, Colombia: University of Missouri Press. ——— (2000) Plato and Aristotle, vol. 3 of Order and History: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 16, Colombia: University of Missouri Press. Weber, Max (1994) Briefe 1909–1910, Tübingen: Mohr. ——— (2016) Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus, Wiesbaden: Springer. Wilson, Catherine (2008) ‘Descartes and Augustine’, in J. Broughton and J. ­Carriero (eds) A Companion to Descartes, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Wydra, Harald (2015a) Politics and the Sacred, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2015b) ‘Liminality and Democracy’, in A. Horvath, B. Thomassen and H. Wydra (eds) Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Oxford: Berghahn.

4 The fool’s subversion Technique of estrangement in Bruegel’s work Federica Montagni

Introduction The character of the fool and the depiction of world as a ‘stage of follies’ are central images in order to understand Renaissance culture and northern Humanism. This chapter aims to problematize, through the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the emergence of these images as expressions of a subverted vision from the outside: the point of view of the trickster. Going back to the Flemish Renaissance, the emergence of a fool’s narrative will be interpreted as an estranged view, the perspective of the ‘outsider’, expressed by Bruegel’s Macchia technique and embodied by the crowds which animate his paintings. The humanist and merchant’s circles of Antwerp, which played a leading role in the Western intellectual and economic life during the first half of the 16th century, will be studied in relation to this new perspective, showing how the image of the Lord of Misrule is used during the celebration of the Feast of Fools as a powerful means for political and moral satire. Thus, following the developments of this festival, the chapter will analyse how the subversive and sacrificial features of the origins were transferred into the secular institution of the Duch rederijker kamer (rhetorical societies), centre of literary life and major source for Bruegel’s subjects. The allegorical and satirical dramas organized by these institutions, set in markets and public squares, gave to the fool a predominant position, relying on his ability of ‘speaking the truth’. On the contrary, studying the new relationship between the spectator and the work of art, the chapter analyses the destructive nature of fool’s knowledge which resembles alchemic processes. Connecting Bruegel’s personal understanding with the broader social changes of his time, this study aims to capture the process of divinization underwent by the fool from the victim of mockery to the Lord of free speech.

The Battle between Carnival and Lent: the artificial birth of the crowd From a distance the swarming crowd rules the frame. The predominant point of view allows the spectator to look over this moment of extraordinary

74  Federica Montagni life. The scene is animated by hundreds of figures, all joining the same moment of popular festivity. It is the Battle between Carnival and Lent (1559)1 depicted by the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The frame reveals the urban scenario where the Carnival festival is taking place. There is something upsetting and yet seductive in the chaotic multitude of characters that clearly dominates the scene. The spectator’s eye which flies over the ‘public square’, set between the Church and the Inn, tries vainly to find a place to pause: there is no handrail for the curious, just the unformed and unordered mass. The theme should represent the fight between the carnivalesque procession and the pious Lent’s observants, a subject already treated by other contemporaries2, placing the accent on the moral difference between the virtuous Catholics and the feasting Lutherans (Stridbeck 1956). However, in Bruegel’s motif, the principle of composition3 and the ambivalence of the figures deny an immediate understanding: the scene is populated by undistinguished corpses, where everyone is absorbed in their own activities and tasks. Although the composition should suggest a ‘choral’ subject, the multitude of characters does not partake in the same scene.4 The festivity is merely the justification for this turbulent gathering, for there is no harmony or agreement in their playing. A superficial opposition is represented at the bottom of the painting: the greedy ‘Carnival’ riding a barrel and the emaciated and ridiculous ‘Lent’ sitting on a cart carried through the city by nuns and monks. Beyond these two figures the procession is scattered, enlivening the city’s streets. However, the moral judgement is purposefully unclear. Everywhere the city is dominated by a hidden malaise: common everyday activities are transformed into a state of deliberate irrationality. Faces are turned into masks, figuratively and symbolically; everywhere the body is mutilated, disguised, or concealed. The image evokes a symbolic recollection of Bruegel’s recurring themes, as if the characters of his paintings, charmed by the singing and summoned by the church’s bell, had gathered together in the same allegorical space. Moral and physical deformation is expressed by a group of cripples having a discussion and screaming to indifferent pedestrians, following the order of a foxy cloak’s man (The Beggars, 1586). In the Carnival procession anonymous figures, with faces covered by a white cloth, have lost their identity and reason (The Beekeepers, c.1568). A couple, abandoned themselves to vice, playing with dice and cards among the animated crowd as in The Triumph of Death (c.1562). A bonfire in the background (Hunters in the Snow, 1565) summons some forgetful dancers (The Village Kermis, c.1567; The Wedding Dance, 1566). Children are all over the place, recalling the crowded painting Children’s Game (1560): for them the Carnival is a perfect playground, where rules are suspended, and adults behave in the same foolish manner.5 Even amongst Lent observants there is a subtle irrational atmosphere: blind men and cripples are begging for charity (The Parable of the Blind, 1568), and some women prepare the fish for Lent, resembling the allegory of Greedy in Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556). In sum, what Bruegel has depicted is not the

The fool’s subversion  75 historical account of a local festivity, rather the ‘symbolic’ representation of a subverted society. This ‘imaginative’ crowd gathers for the Carnival stands as a ‘Theatrum Mundi’ of contemporary society: as if the Boschian crowds depicted in the allegory of Vices had conquered reality. Everywhere the festival, characterized by the suspension of order, has captured the burghers in a liminal enthusiasm. They are singing, drinking, gambling, and dancing, but none of those figures actually show any signs of enjoying it. No one eats but they are all fat, no one drinks but they are all already drunk: there is a sterile and fruitless atmosphere, very far from what Bakhtin has called ‘the world’s revival and renewal’ in his discussion on folk culture and the carnival (Bakhtin 1984). There is a visible difference between this municipal feast and Bruegel’s depiction of peasant life (Peasant Wedding, The Wedding Dance, or the series on The Months and The Seasons). What is lacking here is self-forgetful participation: those feelings of ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom’ that break the boundaries between bodies and express the laughing of the ‘whole world’ (Ibid: 12). Here people are blind, they do not see what surrounds them, or they purposefully do not care. The environment is unsteady; each figure is cut out of the rest with strong and dark contours. A dreamlike effect is gained by the unrealistic usage of shades, as if the bodies would fluctuate over the background. They are passengers 6 in space, seeming to fill the scene without any resistance as if they could disappear in a blink of eyes. The city is transformed into a liminal stage where the anonymous mass plays the main character. Hans Sedlmayr, in his essay on Bruegel’s Macchia (2000), interprets his usage of the colour pattern to create forms and figures as an intentional destruction of the integrity of bodies, as they could fall apart. Sedlmayr calls it a process of metamorphosis where the unity between space and bodies is fragmented into atoms (Ibid: 325). Body’s coherence and harmony is dismantled, taken apart in these fundamental atomistic forms: there are no longer any individuals, just corpses governed by an irrational force, ‘docile bodies’, in the words of Foucault (1991), deprived of an internal measure and ratio, yet subjected to a destructive force. In Bakhtin’s interpretation of the grotesque, the attention of folk culture to the degradation of the body serves as a symbol of fertility, growth, and abundance: ‘to degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place’ (Bakhtin 1984: 21). Bruegel is on the boundary of what Bakhtin called the traditional folk culture and the new realism of the 17th century. His reference to the peasant and traditional life gains a nostalgic and pessimistic hint. Here the perspective is different from the grotesque view: the body is not simply degraded, showing the ‘gross realism’ of corporal acts as in Rabelais’s novels but rather fragmented and divided. We can find evidences of it in the open bodies and the self-mutilation of the daemons in The Fall of the Magician (1564) or in the shapeless monsters assembled for fun of the children (The Children’s Game). The ‘new birth’ expressed by Bruegel’s

76  Federica Montagni carnival consists in the emergence of a new kind of society: the ‘artificial’ birth of the crowd. The divided bodies are crashed together in space and alchemically melted together creating a discordant mass. Bruegel has drawn a crowd of individuals, or what Bakhtin defined as ‘sterile images representing characters, all those professional lawyers, merchants, matchmakers, old man and women, all these masked offered by degenerate, petty realism’ (Bakhtin 1984: 53), where ‘the movement of individuals in the multitude is not determined by a common shared purpose […] exhibit[ing] something like the Brownian motion of particles’ (Stridbeck 1956: 334). The remarkable work of Hans Sedlmayr and the New Vienna School was based on the thought of Alois Riegl and his theorization of the Kunstwollen: the production of a work of art is a socially and ideologically embedded activity; through a reading freed from progressive and functionalist understanding, it can reveal ‘the artistic will’ as the creative drive triggered and shaped by society (Wood 2000). The features of a genre, which Bakhtin related in literature to a specific time-space connotation in his concept of chronotope, in Sedlmayr relates to the artistic technique. Interpreting their insights, Bruegel’s work can be understood as both a perceptive reflection and social expression of the ‘fundamental phenomenon of an estranged world’ (Sedlmayr 2000). The Carnival happens when reality has become unfamiliar, ‘the mask – this most profound deception that disguises a form and changes its meaning – is, as it were, the essence of this process of estrangement concretized as a device’ (Ibid: 340). The mask transforms the known into something unknown, demonic, ridiculous, and bizarre. Bruegel indeed expresses not only the vision of a subverted world but rather the subversion of the vision on the world: from the point of view of the stranger, the detachment perceived by the painter and expressed in his Macchia technique is the result of a process of disenchantment from reality. Subversion lies in the change of perspective: when the world is perceived from the outside, all those individualities which do not recognize themselves as a community are transformed into a crowd. While the Carnival expresses an upside-down reality, Bruegel’s Carnival embodies an outside-in vision. Nevertheless, how to render such an estranged vision significant? Again, Bruegel comes for our help, offering a suggestion. At the centre of the painting, an unnoticed figure finds his space through the chaotic mass: the fool or jester, symbol of the Carnival carrying a torch and enlightening the space around him. He’s followed by two figures, seen from behind, covered by hats that hide their identities: a woman carries the light of reason unlit on her back7 and an unknown man with a heavy sack, symbol of ‘man’s own faults and weakness[es]’ (Stridbeck 1956: 108) or even the burden of his avarice.8 The theme of folly recurs in many of Bruegel’s paintings, both as declared subject and as concealed motif. We can find it in the Feast of Fools engraving or in the infernal representation of Dulle Griet, depicted a few years before his death in 1564 (Castelli 2007), where ‘Mad Molly’ runs through the world plagued by daemons, leaving destruction behind her.

The fool’s subversion  77 Again, in the Children’s Game there are several allusions to folly both as representation of the ‘topsy-turvy world’ (Stridbeck 1956) and as theatrum vitae humanae (Gibson 1977) connected with the development of humanist education ­(Orrock 2012). Again, in The Proverbs (1559) the visual translation of traditional sayings into images expresses the ‘World’s Follies’, where the central subject of the ‘blue cloak’ suggests foolish human blindness to the surrounding madness. The theme of the fool and his presence in both literature and popular feast is not a Renaissance novelty: it can be traced back to the Hellenic buffoon (γελωτοποιός), the laugh-maker who animated the court of Philip and Alexander (Welsford 1935). The work of Enid Welsford gives an exemplary account of the social and literary history of the fool in his different types, from Greek freelance fools who travel from town to town, entertaining people in markets and squares, to the Medieval jester and the court-fool of the Renaissance. In 13th-century France the activity of the jongleurs was associated with histriones (actors), scurri (buffons), and the much debated figure of mimi (mimes).9 Some sources associate them with gamblers, magicians, and prostitutes (Baldwin 1997). This association, made for example by French theologians in the 13th century, attached to the juggler the legal status of infamia which prevented them to enter holy orders and receive the eucharist. In 1215, Pope Innocent III invoked the Lateran Council to order all clergy ‘to avoid contact with mimes, jugglers, and actors’ (Ibid: 641). What emerges in different modalities is a specific kind of estrangement. The fool either can come from the outside or can be excluded from social life: we can find him in antiquity treated as a scapegoat or trapped by demonic and divine inspirations. However, in the majority of cases what applies as a common rule doesn’t apply to the fool. He lives outside the realm of the ordinary and can act free from everyday norms. The term Parasite, described by Welsford as a proto-professional buffoon in Greek culture, was ‘applied to those whose position at the table was due neither to right nor to courtesy but to their own impudence’ (Welsford 1935: 4). Hence, another characteristic emerges: the fool is not simply the outsider but one who takes advantage of his position, making him resemble closely the figure of the trickster, as discussed by Horvath (2013) and Thomassen (Horvath and Thomassen 2008). With the liminal figure of the fool, the estranged vision finds a perfect companion: his exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. (Foucault 2013: 11) At this point a question rises spontaneously: how he managed to move from the margin of society to the centre of the painting? His absence of participation and involvement, and the power of an estranged view gave  him

78  Federica Montagni an unexpected predominant position in a world turn upside down. What ­Bruegel has understood is this new role of Folly, not just as allegorical representation of an upside-down world but rather the social and political relevance of this representation. The economic and social changes of the 16th century carried with them the stone of madness. The spreading of Carnival as permanent Fair and the institution of a ‘stock market’ economy (Szakolczai 2017) transformed society into a permanent liminal stage where wandering merchants and swindlers mingled together. As illustrated in the following paragraph, the secularization of the Feast of Fools into institutionalized rhetorical chambers and the emergence of the political use of mocking and satire by them awarded the fool with full legitimacy not just on the temporary stage of the feast but as a powerful means for political and religious controversy. From now on he lives at the centre of the painting as the Abbot of Unreason and the Lord of Misrule.

A subversive tradition: the Feast of Fools and the winter feast origins Bruegel’s contemporaries acclaimed his work for its realism: ‘Here [is] nature, expressed in painted forms. It is astonished to see [..] that Bruegel is her equal’.10 The fool, indeed, represents not just an allegorical image but rather an accustomed presence in the 16th-century city life. It wouldn’t be hard to see a ‘cap and bells’ juggler entertaining some market visitors or parading though the city during a drama festival (Welsford 1935). However, his undisputed kingdom certainly was the Christmas feast, celebrated in his honour. During the 15th and 16th centuries, a folk celebration gained increasing importance in the urban panorama: The Feast of Fools or Feast of the Ass (Chambers 1903). Several accounts of the feast had drawn a heterogeneous geography of practices and traditions, but a main common aspect arises: the festival was a moment of social and hierarchical subversion, where the common rules and moral bounds were suspended and the community entered in a singular liminal state. The festum stultorum is included in those celebrations called generically as ‘winter festivities’, with important correlation with the anthropological concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘the rite of passage’ (Van Gennep 1992; Turner 1995; Horvath, Thomassen, and Wydra 2015). Thus, under this name can be grouped all those ceremonies connected with the winter solstice and the threshold phase in between the finishing year and the beginning of a new one.11 The Celtic rituals, before the Romanization, are remembered for their sacrificial character: the end of the season was celebrated with a banquet and a great sacrifice, accompanied by the perambulation purification rites (Chambers 1903: 229). A great bonfire, symbol of sacrifice, was lit in the villages similar to the one depicted by Bruegel in the background of The Battle between Carnival and Lent. The sacrificial origins of those winter feasts re-emerge in the scapegoating character the Mock King presents in the Roman Saturnalia discussed by Frazer (1913)

The fool’s subversion  79 and theoretically developed by Girard in his La violence et le sacré (1972). Thus, the two major traditional Roman feasts, the Saturnalia in December and the Kalends at the beginning of January, have a recognized recall to the European carnivalesque festival and a strong connection with the Feast of Fools. During the festival, which started on December 17 and lasted roughly seven days, the law courts were shut down, and class divisions were temporary suspended. Social and moral properties were dismissed, and you could see ‘masters made merry with their servants and consented for the time to be on a footing of strict equality with them’ (Chambers 1903: 236). During the Kalends festivity, once more we witness masters drinking and playing dice with the slaves and, according to the early Christian Fathers, there was a parade of revellers wearing woman’s clothes or masked with animal’s skin. There are three important aspects in both traditions: the sacrificial feature, the subversion of everyday order, and the opening of an extra-ordinary liminal phase. The sacrificial aspect finds confirmation in the central figure of the Rex Saturnalitius. During the feast an interim king was chosen by the community, giving the concept of rulership an ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, he recalls the role of a Master of Ceremony, as described by Turner (1995): he was appointed to guide the community during the entire period of the festival. Following this reading, he resembles also the βασιλεύς συμποσιάρχης, the rex convivii of the Latin world, in charge for pouring and serving the wine during the symposium. On the other hand, Frazer, analyzing Lucian’s Saturnalia, identifies him as the Mock King, with the typical features of the sacrificial victim: during the Saturnalia the divinized victim reached the rank of royal commander while, at the same time, he was mocked and derided. Moreover, during the Saturnalia the ‘theatricality’ was fundamental, especially during Nero’s empire, period of flourishing of the second sophistic (Jacobs 2006: 119). Both the Mock King and the theatrical connotations will find a perfect parallel in the mediaeval development of the Feast of Fools. Evidently, with the establishment in the Roman world of the Christian festivities, many of the Saturnalia’s and Kalends’s practices were absorbed into them. The establishment of the great ecclesiastical celebration of Christmas joined with the previous constellation of winter festivities, ‘[they] together made the latter half of December and the beginning of January into a continuous Carnival’ (Chambers 1903: 234).

The Feast of Fools during the Middle Ages The Feast of Fools differs somewhat from the aforementioned winter feast, and its development is linked with the emergence of new social classes in the late Middle Ages: the city clergy, the ‘bourgeois’, and the courtier. ‘The growth of towns, the increasing importance of the bourgeoisie, the guild movement, the spread of education, did not leave the folk-festivals unchanged’ (Welsford 1935: 198). They added something different, especially the ‘theatrical’ element. ‘The ruling idea of the feast is the inversion of the

80  Federica Montagni status, and the performance inevitably burlesque, by the inferior clergy of functions properly belonging to their better’ (Chambers 1903: 326). The so-called ‘Feast of Fools’ can be found in the record, mainly in France, with different names, such as festum stultorum, fatuorum, or festum subdiaconorum, underlining the centrality of the inferior clergy in the promotion of it. Besides the Feast of Fools, with similar features, there is the Festum baculi (the name refers to the use of the pastoral staff during the burlesque liturgy) or Feast of The Ass, celebrated during Circumcision or Epiphany. It was a day during the year when subversion of roles took place, with a reversal of hierarchies, liturgy, and practices. The Mass was celebrated in a burlesque fashion and ‘enriched’ with a particular Prose of the Ass. Chambers underlines the introduction by the subdeacons of larvae (horrific demonic mask) and theatrales ludi into churches (Ibid: 279) with the advent of a special composition of offices and choir-books. The practices were heterogeneous: singing and dancing were combined with eating and drinking, not just in the refectory but often in front of the church’s doors, often with unrestrained outcomes. Besides the masks it was not unusual to find clergy dressed as women or with their clothes turned inside out, exchanging their outfits with the laity. In 1199 in Notre Dame of Paris for the Circumcision Feast ‘disorders, even to shedding of blood’ caught the interest of Pope Innocent III, who protested against ‘jests and madness that make the clergy a mockery’ (Jung 1969: 257). The description made by Eustace de Mesnil, dean of the Faculty of Theology, is quite evocative: Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally, they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts; and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste. (Chambers 1903: 294) The first clear accounts of the feast go back to the end of the 12th century, following the research of Chambers (1903), who analysed the orders for reformation sent throughout Europe in order to contain the outrageous ceremonies that were spreading in cathedrals and collegiate churches. He argues, based on the first notices of similar practices, that the origins of the ‘Feast of Fools’ should be found in the Eastern World, especially in Constantinople. The protagonist of the story is the Emperor Michael III The Drunkard (ὁ Μέθυσος) (AD 842–67). His captain of the guard, a mime and buffoon, was chosen as a mock ‘patriarch’ riding in the city’s street on a white ass

The fool’s subversion  81 exposing the real patriarch Ignatius to the mockery of the revellers. Then, in the 9th century, the Council of Constantinople condemned the profanity of courtiers who paraded a mock-patriarch and desecrated the Divine mysteries. The byzantine origins of this mocking and subversive tradition, if connected with the sociopolitical role of Byzantine mimes in the Constantinople court (Szakolczai 2013), and their influence on the Western Renaissance, give a new reading to the later development of this celebration.

King for a day: the victimization of the trickster Carl Gustav Jung argued in his fascinating chapter The Psychology of the Trickster-Figure that the Feast of Fools ‘reveals the spirit of the trickster in his original form’ (Jung 1969: 258). Thus, during the feast, a ‘Bishop’ or ‘Archbishop’ of Fools was chosen for taking the offices and gives benedictions. This ‘King of Fools’ adopted during the centuries the features and behaviour of the court-jester with the distinctive aspect of Lord of Misrule: he gained the power of unpunished satire and mocking, exercising his ‘right of free speech’ (Welsford 1935). Whether the social and political relevance of the Lord of Misrule took place before or after the ‘secularization’ of the feast is worthy of further study. Nonetheless, it was especially during the 15th and 16th centuries that the Prince of Fools changed its connotation from folk-mocking to social criticism. Therefore, reflecting on the trickster is fundamental to a reading of the Mock King that underscores its centrality in analyzing the symbolic values accrued in literary, religious, and political discourses. Following the study of Horvath (2013), during a period of ritual liminality (the New Year festivity) the trickster can gain power. When this happens, the temporary ‘master of ceremonies’ can change his role from the guide to the ‘misguide’, embodied by the fool. Here we go back to Bruegel and his vision of the estranged crowd: the fragmented and divided mass who are ‘lighted’ by the torch of folly. The jester, trickster symbol par excellence, managed to emerge as King and ‘artificially’ reunite the individuals under his sceptre. The power of the crowd is used and channelled by the trickster in order to gain his state of ‘holiness’. A reflection on the ‘divinization’ of the fool is needed here: one of the major characteristics of the trickster is ‘his approximation to the figure of the saviour’ (Jung 1969). The archetypal image of the shamanic ‘wounded wounder’ (Ibid.) can be traced back in one of the most ancient evidence of human culture, the prehistoric paintings of Lascaux. Here the Shaft Scene shows the ‘wounded shaman’ who gains power though his victimization, which finds a parallel with Girard’s theory of scapegoating (Girard 1992). Here, again, the millennial story is repeated. The fool, the Mock King, manages to gain power by subverting his role from the ‘wounder’, the hangman or the oppressor, to the ‘wounded’ victim. The scapegoating mechanism is used by the trickster in order to gain power. The victim becomes sacred or divine and can act out of the ordinary. The victim cannot be blamed anymore, but he can, in turn, blame others. Like the fool he has become the

82  Federica Montagni representation of the outcast and can ask for the right to speak. Welsford (1935) suggests that the Lord of Misrule represented not ‘simply the ebullition of the natural lout beneath the cassock’, as Chambers argued, but a ‘sign of increased intelligence’ where the educated clergy used ‘their folly as a stalking-horse’ for addressing a licenced critic of society. With the spread of fool’s legitimacy beyond the limit of the religious festival, and his establishment on public stages, the subversive use of mocking and satire entered in the new humanist and bourgeoise discourses on values and meanings.

The temporary becomes permanent: the chambers of rhetoric Despite the numerous attempts to reform the scandalous celebration, in the 14th century the evidences of the festum fatuorum become more frequent and so do the efforts to stop what Jean-Charlier de Gerson defined an indecency that ‘would shame a kitchen or a tavern’ (Chambers 1903: 292). In some cases, the celebration was removed from the church, with a procession through the city and the supper in the house of the canon instead of the tavern. But the prohibitions did not occur without opposition: during the 15th century several cases of riots and rebellion took place (Ibid: 296) and, interestingly, this kind of resistance occurred in the form of ‘­satirical verse, the performance of topical plays, and the preaching of burlesque sermons’ (Welsford 1935: 202). In the Chapter of Troyes, a play performed in the public square, with Hypocrisy, Pretence, and False Semblance as main characters, followed the mise en scène of a burlesque consecration of a mock-­archbishop. Just in 1435, with the Council of Basle, the celebration of the Feast of Fools was officially banned and with the national council of Bourges in 1438, issued by Charles VII, the prohibition become ecclesiastical law in France. ‘But the chapters were obstinate; the feasts were popular, not only with the inferior clergy themselves, but with the spectacle-loving bourgeois of the cathedral towns’, and it took almost one century and a half to be expelled from the religious practice (Chambers 1903: 293). The prominent role gained by commercial cities and the merchant class contributed in changing the festival’s practices and, I would argue, the political and social relevance of the fool, which ‘by the beginning of the Renaissance had become a fashion in society, and an obsession in literature’ (Welsford 1935: 198). Indeed, even if the feast was banished from the churches it did not disappear: the legitimate heir of the Prince of Fools can be found in the secular Prince des Sots, Mère-Folle, and the Abbot de Malgouverne. These were the temporary sovereigns brought through the streets by the Companies des fous who no longer were represented by vicars but by the bourgeoise instead, and the dominus festi has been transformed in a popular mask more than a clerical bishop (­Chambers 1903: 373). The phenomenon was well known in France and in the Low Countries from the end of the 16th century up to the middle of the 17th century. What was a temporary, seasonal feast now became a permanent guild in order to maintain the tradition in the secular society. The guilds during the 16th century underwent an important growth, where ‘practically every town possessed at least one rederijker kamer

The fool’s subversion  83 ­(chamber of rhetoric)’ (Gibson 1981). Some authors have questioned the direct historical link between the clerical Feast of Fools and the secular société joyeuse, by highlighting the differences between the two (Harris 2011). Chambers, however, despite some reserve, is quite certain about their connection: The Dijon example [l’Infanterie Dijonnaise] is but a late one of a development which had long taken place in many parts of northern France and Flanders. It would be difficult to assert that a société joyeuse never made its appearance in any town before the ecclesiastical Feast of Fools had died out therein. Occasionally the two institutions overlap. But, roughly speaking, the one is the inheritor of the other. (Chambers 1903: 374) It is undeniable that, especially in its late stage, during the 1550s and 1560s, the rederijker in Flanders had developed specific and autonomous features. Ludovico Guicciardini, in his Description of the Low Country, characterized Antwerp’s rhetorical chambers for their dramatic activities. Among them, the kluchten were episodes inspired by the peasant life, while the spleen van sinne performs allegorical plays with the personification of Virtues and Vices (Gibson 1977). The connection between the ‘high’ register of the rhetorical chambers, which present themselves as ‘imitation of Greeks and ­Romans’12 (Guicciardini 1567: 97), and the folk and subversive character of the feast of fools should not surprise. A clear division between classical and folk ‘grotesque’ tradition cannot be found in the northern Renaissance of the 16th century (Watson 1979; Bakhtin 1984); nevertheless the question of the relationship between the two is still debated by historians. Although, with passage from the religious celebration to the secular feast, the dramatic and popular jester gained even more allegorical significance, converging on the classical figure of the laughter (Bakhtin 1984; Gibson 2006). Towns and cities witnessed the formation of permanent organizations, the secular chamber of rhetoric, that gained social and political legitimization. In a first stage, they promoted seasonal festivities in public squares and markets, and, later, with the worsening of the counter-­ Reformation and the burst of War between the Low Countries and Philip II of Spain, they moved in taverns and private homes. These chambers of rhetoric were formed primarily by middle class citizens: craftsmen, artisan, and shopkeepers. However, with the growing prestige of the association, the presence of bankers and merchants and other upper-class members of society became more the norm. The temporal aspect is also of vital importance: whereas with the religious Feast of Fools, the celebration was limited to the Christmas period, with the permanent guilds, the attention was transferred to other popular feasts as well, such as the Spring Carnival or the Midsummer, more suitable months for the increasingly luxurious burghers (Chambers 1903). It can be argued that what happened in Flanders is best interpreted using the concept of ‘permanent liminality’, as Szakolczai (2013) and Horvath (2013) applied to the birth of Commedia dell’Arte during

84  Federica Montagni the first half of the 16th century in Venice. Indeed, the religious celebration was originally limited within a specific space-time frame. However, coincident with a moment of political and social transformation, the temporary ritual had crystalized into a permanent and official secularized form, still carrying with it the subversive and sacrificial character of its origins. Similar to Venice, in Flanders the role of the professional mimes was central: the rederijker kamers were associations of amateurs where minstrels, trouvères, and mimes also found a prominent place as professionals in the art of acting and composing (Chambers 1903). Here again the subversive character emerges in the forms of satire and chiarivari (the mockery of second marriages, marriages of those of ridiculously unequal ages, spouse-beaters, similar disgraces, usually accompanied by obscene insults) and the sottie, performed by actors costumed as fools, where folly covers both the role of the actor and the subject of the monologue (Watson 1979).13 These dramatic performances were more than simple entertainment: ‘when the matter of the farces, comic dialogues, and mock-sermons was not the burlesquing and parody of order and hierarchy, the topical satire could become rough and vicious, naming names and hurling invectives’ (Chambers 1903: 339). The fool who had lost his reason can talk about insanity: he is the one allowed to act with this critical and mocking attitude (sacrificial aspect of the fool). He cannot be taken seriously, due to his irony and humour, yet, ironically, he is the only one allowed to say the ‘unnameable truth’ (subversive aspect of the fool). But when madness started to break the boundaries of his ritual confinement and don the mask of the everyday man (The Elck), no one could say any longer who was ill and who was sane. Potentially every man was a fool, and if he was not, it meant that he was the most foolish one, who did not recognize his madness (Niemant en kent hem selven,14 ‘nobody knows himself’). With this connotation the image of the fool entered in the humanist dramatic composition: society was transmuted in a stage where all man became ignorant actors and the Mère Folle gained a universal sway in this new world of fools.

The humanists circle of Antwerp and Pieter Bruegel’s work This vision of folly and the new humanist ethos found in Bruegel’s painting a vehicle of expression. In the history of commentaries around ­Bruegel, some scholars have underlined his debts to his patrons’ taste, especially with the humanist circle of Antwerp (Sullivan 1992; Gibson 2006; Orrock 2012). Other scholars instead interpreted his paintings as the expression of a concealed ‘symbolism’, of his personal philosophical or religious belief. I would argue that both elements largely contributed to his work. The new ‘market’ logic had probably stamped in his art the necessity to appeal to the new merchant’s taste, not just locally but also internationally: the Pand market, operating in Antwerp during the annual trade fairs, was the largest and most important market in Europe from the 1460s to the 1560s

The fool’s subversion  85 (Ewing 1990). Furthermore, most of his patrons and commissioners belonged to this new educated bourgeois class: the printers Abraham Ortelius and ­Hieronymus Cock first, and wealthy bankers and royal officials such as Niclaes ­Jonghelinck or the German merchant Hans Fanckert.15 In addition, most of them, jointly with Bruegel’s immediate artists circle like ­P ieter Baltens and Maerten de Vos, took active part in the major rhetorical chambers of Antwerp, the Violieren (Gibson 1981). When in 1499 the ­Portuguese spice’s market moved from Bruges to Antwerp, which hosted the major international fairs with Lyon, the city became not just one of the most powerful commercial and financial centres of Western Europe but also a key point for the spreading of humanism (Kennedy 2001). In this context, the rhetorical guilds performed an important role as centre of literary life. In 1561, Violieren guild of Antwerp organized a memorable landjuweel, a dramatic competition between several chambers, in Brabant. It was ‘opened by a splendid public procession containing twenty-three lavishly decorated allegorical floats and nearly fourteen hundred rederijkers on horseback, with still others riding in almost two hundred wagons, all participants brilliantly costumed’ (Gibson 1981: 428). The celebration lasted almost a month. This kind of drama festival became a channel for merging the peasant tradition with the new ‘ethical’ framework of the rational humanist, while the subversive component embodied by satire took place alongside the ‘classical’ sources. We do not know if Bruegel participated actively in the life of the guild, but several of his engravings recall those events. The iconography of The Feast of Fools, while not representing the historical fool’s processions through the city, has been connected by Moxley (1982) to the play De Sottenbollen (‘The Numbskulls’), performed during the celebration. Thus, The Proverbs, The Witch of Mallegem (1559), The Everyman, and Dulle Griet also had direct references with plays and dramas performed during these events (Ibid.). In The Ass of School (1556), Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, The Alchemist (1558), or the series on Vices and Virtues commissioned by Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel displays the rederijker predilection for puns and proverbs and allegorical meaning. Nevertheless, Bruegel expressed not just the formal interests of his literary circles but also their new vision on man and society: the rational humanist man intertwined with the secular bourgeois ethos. In fact, in the landjuweel of 1561, the competition was opened with a praise of merchants and their contribution to the country’s prosperity, where ‘reason’ and ‘measure’ were fundamental for a ‘honest profit’ and ‘wealth’ as ‘soul and blood of mankind’, and already in 1559, the theme of the Age of Gold was illustrated, with a specific accent on material wealth (Gibson 1981: 443), echoing the iconography of The Land of Cockaigne, painted by Bruegel in 1567. Again, in the drawing of Temperance (1560) we can find the representation of the Virtues and Liberal Arts, with a stage on the background where an allegorical drama is displayed over the careful looking of a jester with cap and bells.

86  Federica Montagni

Piet the Droll: interpreting Bruegel’s irony Many scholars had successfully showed how Bruegel often expressed humanist values and interests, and there is an abundance of iconographic and literary examples. However, his work cannot be simply reduced to an expression of his cultural circle: his biography, even if limited by a lack of documentation, shows us a traveller with a magnificent sense of humour, and a marked genius, recognized by his contemporaries. Thus, his paintings, while marked by frankness and light heartedness, remain puzzling at bottom. Nothing in Bruegel’s work is crystal clear – his face is troubled as in The Painter and the Buyer and his gaze reflects the ‘painful attitude of one who describes the world and hesitates to paint with the brush, what he is seeing beyond what it seems to be there’16 (Castelli 2007: 61). There is a deep ambivalence in his work, which is gained using a subtle sense of humour. Humour is Bruegel’s weapon; the irony expresses his doubts and reflection on a reality which he felt to be more and more ‘estranged’ from nature. We cannot be sure if this ambivalence reflects the ambiguous character of his society, a hidden polemic against the sociopolitical reality of his time or, on the contrary, as Enrico Castelli had argued, the way in which Bruegel deals with the Evil. Therefore, the Evil cannot be taken seriously, and only by a subversive means it is possible to understand a subverted world. In this reading, Folly gained an interesting position: the one who is already foolish cannot lose his reason again, and Bruegel’s irony saves him, subverting the Evil, looking beyond it. Bruegel’s comical ambivalence is Folly’s Prodigal Son; it comes from it but at the same time defeats it. The subverted and chaotic world, which stands in front of Bruegel, is interpreted by his alienated eye. The same estrangement which mutilates the world in pieces in The Battle between Carnival and Lent recalls the demonic dimension of Bosch, the vision of those chaotic crowds as the vision of Hell. Hence, Sedlamayr called Bruegel’s estrangement as the ‘secularisation of Bosch’s pan-diabolism’ (Sedlmayr 2000: 351). The nightmares of Bosch with their demonic fantasy were transformed into Bruegel’s ridiculous scenes, in social and moral satire. Folly stands between the crowd and the divine, relying on his power of estrangement. For mediaeval hermitism, madness was a means for achieving isolation in a crowd: when the anchorite can no longer goes to the desert in order to find isolation, the noisy and congested life of the city allows him the only possibility of madness ‘where idiocy isolated them more than a cell’ (de Certeau 1992: 47). The divinization of the fool is gained through the ascetic technique of estrangement. Thus, the estranged vision can be interpreted as the ambivalence in the fool’s perspective: it is Bruegel’s detachment from the new ‘economic life’17 populated by dishonest merchants, misanthropes, cripples, and anonymous masses but at the same time showing the foolish smile of the buyer (The Painter and The Buyer) who fails to understand the corruption which contaminates his world. The merchant watches in Bruegel’s paintings the joyful and didactic playing of children, the careless carnival festivity, or the depiction of a moral and political allegory. In fact, he smiles, smugly satisfied, with his hand already placed in his money’s bag.

The fool’s subversion  87 The fool’s knowledge Bruegel’s paintings were usually displayed in merchants’ private homes as a sort of conversational piece where they were enjoyed by invitation only (Orrock 2012). The curious eyes of the audience were stimulated by the countless details and attracted to scrutinize closer, to investigate, discover, and interpret. Precisely this attitude, to a work of art or to reality, can be called the ‘fool’s knowledge’: the stranger who does not participate needs to destroy in order to understand, to break in pieces and look inside (Sedlmayr 2000). The crowded paintings do not just express the vision of the fool but also trigger it in the audience as a trap for the foolish. Here, the destructive character of a subverted vision emerges again: the outside viewer needs to breach into the corpses, to dissolve the unity and analyse every detail, looking for a ‘deeper’ meaning. However, as Castelli (2007: 19) says, ‘if everything has become intelligible, nothing is then understandable, because what is left is just a void’. Hence, ‘to under-stand’ means ‘to stand among, between’, a position that is denied to the fool: the meaning for him is not comprehensible because he stands ‘outside’. That void is symbolized by Bruegel’s deformed crowd in the same way of an alchemical nigredo (Castelli 2007), the raw material for shaping a new kind of ‘society’. The alchemic ‘madness’ can be tracked down in Bruegel’s The Fall of the Magician Hermogenes (1565) or the engraving Wrath (1558), which illustrate the theme of monstrosity and hermaphroditism, the melting together of the opposites. The Hermes, with the knife in his mouth and the vase in the other, symbolizes the destruction brought by the science of opposite substances, while the Anger is the temptation of dividing what is united in nature. In the engraving The Alchemist, the fool stands there in the centre of the frame in his traditional costume. The fool is in charge of blowing on the fire, from the Latin word follis ‘bellow’ as the ‘blacksmith’s bellows’ in Old French. It is the one who keeps the alchemist’s dream of gold transmutation alive. Again, the trickster and the fool are joined together as Prometheus, the trickster deity, which gave to men the technique for the permanent fire, the fool who transforms the given and the temporary in something permanent, the one who ‘fans the flames’ of the alchemic fire. The book, open on the reading desk, is the ‘Al-ghemist’, a pun in Dutch for ‘all is lost’: foolish knowledge can just lead ‘into the void’.

Conclusion Bruegel’s work does not simply show the centrality of Folly’s theme in the context of northern humanism but also expresses his own insights on the social consequences of this shift of perspective. Thus, the image of the fool was extensively employed by the Chambers of Rhetoric for its moral and allegorical effectiveness. Its subversive connotations were used as a means of political and religious criticism and burlesque mocking. This kind of spirit, strongly alive in the medieval Feast of Fools, had passed into the s­ ecularized rhetorical institutions. With this essential transformation, the sacrificial but temporary character of the Mock King has turned into permanent, opening

88  Federica Montagni the stage for the action of the trickster. Sottie and satirical drama allowed the fool, both actor and subject, to spread his estranged ‘vision’ into the humanistic and mercantile society of the Lower Countries. The city was transformed into an allegorical stage of foolishness, what Erasmus’ had already called the World’s Follies. As we have seen in Battle between Carnival and Lent, this estrangement emerged from Bruegel’s depiction of the crowd, where the individuals are cut off from the surrounding space and from each other. Looking at such corpses and chaotic masses, the eye investigates the details when it cannot grasp the totality. This attitude denotes what I have called ‘the alchemic knowledge of the fool’, which breaks them into pieces and then merges them again into an ‘artificial’ entity (The Proverb, Children Game). This research fits into the broader discussion on the emergence of the theatre during the Renaissance and its influence on the development of an ‘audience’ or ‘spectator’ perspective. Thus, Bruegel is a witness of a new ­relationship between the spectator and the work of art which affected the mercantile s­ ociety of ­ etachment Antwerp during the 16th century. That vision of the outside is the d of the stranger, which is still very alive today in the fascination for the ‘unseen’.18

Notes 1 For a reference catalogue of Pieter Bruegel’s work, see Sellink (2007). 2 As suggested by Gibson (1981: 441), the immediate source seems to have been Lent and Carnival depicted by Frans Hogenberg and published by Hieronymus Cock in 1558. The subject was also employed for several plays of the period (Swarzenski 1951). Stridbeck, working on the iconography of the painting, argues that the Lent and her followers and surroundings were intended to represent the Catholic Church and the methods employed in its struggle. If this is c­ orrect, the obese Prince Carnival and his feasting and gambling partisans must represent the opponents of the Church, the Lutheran Reformation. (Stridbeck 1956: 102) 3 The term ‘composition’ in the reading of Hans Sedlmayr (2000) is defined as the principle of painting a ‘whole out of parts of very different substance’, as a piecing together, which give to the image a sense of discordance and estrangement as main characteristic of Mannerism. 4 In reference to ‘chorality’ as a means of harmony, and the cacophony aspect as discordance, see Boland (2019). The theme is in reference with the crowded paintings of Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights, where the demonic plays monstrous songs, a cacophonic Hell, and where unbearable sounds physically and allegorically tear apart the bodies (Castelli 2007). 5 For the interpretation of Children’s Game as a theatrum vitae humanae as an emblematic allegory of Folly, see Hindman (1981). 6 The liminal state of the fool is thoroughly described by Foucault in History of Madness: He is the Passenger par excellence, the prisoner of the passage. It is not known where he will land, and when he lands, he knows not whence he came. His truth and his home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his own. (Foucault 2013: 11)

The fool’s subversion  89 The fool’s home is the threshold, which conveys both the liminal and the estranged existential condition. 7 The same symbolism of the lantern can be found in the engraving The Elck (1558). Some scholars have suggested, the lantern he carries may allude ironically to Diogenes, the ancient philosopher who carried a lighted lamp in broad daylight in his quest for an honest man and who spurned the very things for which Elck so avidly searches. (Gibson 2006: 42) 8 See the Avarice drawing (1556) in the series The Seven Deadly Sins, where sacks and bags symbolize the burden of the deadly vice. 9 For an account of the relationship between mimes and politics, see Horvath (2010, 2013), and for the connection with the Byzantine court and the emergence of public sphere, see Szakolczai (2013). For their influence on Italian Renaissance, see Szakolczai (2007). 10 Inscription on the back of The Beggars, written by a contemporary (Sellink 2007). 11 For a detailed study of winter festivities, see Chambers (1903, II: xi–xii). 12 ‘alla maniera dei Greci e dei Romani’ [Translated by the author]. 13 About the debts of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly to the sottie genre, see (Watson 1979). 14 Inscription below the picture of the fool in Brughel’s engraving The Everyman (c.1558). 15 Bruegel’s paintings were owned, almost exclusively, by members of Antwerp’s professional, merchant class. Five of Bruegel’s paintings appear in the 1572 estate inventory of the collection of Jean Noirot, a former master of the Antwerp Mint, while Bruegel’s Twelve Proverb Plates belonged to the banker Niclaes ­Cornelius Cheeus. Niclaes Jonghelinck, a businessman and government official, was Bruegel’s most enthusiastic collector; a document of 1565 lists 16 paintings by Bruegel within Jonghelinck’s extensive art collection. 16 ‘L’amara attitudine di chi descrive il mondo ed evita con il pennello a segnare ciò che vede al di là di ciò che appare’ (Castelli 2007: 61) [translation by author]. 17 The use of the term ‘economic life’ is in relation to Szakolczai’s (2016, Ch. 3) reflection on Rabelais’s ‘vie économique’. 18 The reference is to the recent ‘digital exhibition’ promoted by Google Arts & Culture and hosted by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium (2016–2020) called Bruegel. Unseen Masterpieces: When Art Meets Technology. Here, the ‘­experience’ of the spectator is transformed into a ‘treasure hunt’ where he would be able to see ‘details that cannot be seen by the naked eye’ (Amit Sood – ­Director of the Google Cultural Institute).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (1994) L’uomo senza contenuto, Macerata: Quodlibet. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baldwin, John. W. (1997) ‘The Image of the Jongleur in Northern France Around 1200’, Speculum 72: 635–663. Barrett, Kerry (2013) ‘Boschian Bruegel, Bruegelian Bosch: Hieronymus Cock’s Production of “Bosch” Prints’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 5, 2. doi:10.5092/jhna.2013.5.2.3. Boland, Tom (2019) The Spectacle of Critique: From Philosophy to Cacophony, ­London: Routledge.

90  Federica Montagni Canetti, Elias (1962) Crowds and Power, London: Phoenix Press. Castelli, Enrico (2007) Il demoniaco nell’arte, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Chambers, Edmund K. (1903) The Mediaeval Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Certeau, Michel (1992) The Mystic Fable, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Erasmus, Desiderius (1941) The Praise of Folly, New York: Modern Library. Ewing, Dan (1990) ‘Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460–1560’, The Art Bulletin 72, 4: 558–584. Foucault, Michel (1991) Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin. ——— (2006) Le parole e le cose: un’archeologia delle scienze umane, Milan: Rizzoli. ——— (2013) History of Madness, London: Routledge. Frazer, James George (1913) ‘Part IV - The Scapegoat’, in The Golden Bough, London: Macmillan. Gibson, Walter (1977) Bruegel, London: Thames and Hudson. ——— (1981) ‘Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel’, The Art Bulletin 63, 3: 426–446. ——— (2006) Pieter Bruegel and The Art of Laughter, London: University of ­California Press. Girard, René (1992) La violenza e il sacro, Milan: Adelphi. Guicciardini, Lodovico (1567) Descrittione di M. Lodovico Guicciardini patrizio fiorentino di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, Antwerp: Guglielmo Silvio stampatore regio (Willen Silvius). Harris, Max (2011) Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hindman, Sandra (1981) ‘Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games, Folly, and Chance’, The Art Bulletin 63, 3: 447–475. Horvath, Agnes (2010) ‘Pulcinella, or the Metaphysics of the Nulla: In Between ­Politics and Theatre’, History of the Human Sciences 23, 2: 47–67. ——— (2013) Modernism and Charisma, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Horvath, Agnes and Thomassen, Bjorn (2008) ‘Mimetic Errors in Liminal Schismogenesis: On the Political Anthropology of the Trickster’, International Political Anthropology 1, 1: 3–24. Horvath, Agnes, Thomassen, Bjorn, and Wydra, Harald (eds.) (2015) Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, New York: Berghahn Books. Huizinga, Johan (1954) The Waning of the Middle Ages, New York: Duobleday Anchor Books. Jacobs, Marc (2006) ‘King for a Day’, in J. Deploige and G. Deneckere (eds.) Mystifying the Monarch, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Jung, Carl Gustav (1969) ‘On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure’, in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 9, New York: Routledge. Kennedy, Hugh (2001) Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moxey, Keith P. F. (1982) ‘Pieter Bruegel and The Feast of Fools’, The Art Bulletin 64, 4: 640–646. Orrock, Amy (2012) ‘Homo Ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the ­Humanist Educators’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 4, 2: 1–22. Praz, Mario (1975) Studies in the Seventeenth-Century Imagery, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

The fool’s subversion  91 Screech, Michael A. (1992) Some Renaissance Studies: Selected Articles 1951–1991 with a Bibliography, Geneva: Librairie Droz. Sedlmayr, Hans (2000) ‘Bruegel’s Macchia’, in C. Wood (ed) The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, New York: Zone Books. Sellink, Manfred (2007) Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints, London: Ludion. Stridbeck, Carl G. (1956) ‘Combat between Carnival and Lent’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19, 1/2: 96–109. Sullivan, Margaret A. (1992) ‘Bruegel’s Misanthrope’, Artibus et Historiae 13, 26: 143–162 Swarzenski, Hanns. (1951) ‘The Battle between Carnival and Lent’, Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts 49, 275: 2–11 Szakolczai, Arpad (2007) Sociology, Religion and Grace, New York: Routledge. ——— (2013) Comedy and the Public Sphere: The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena, New York: Routledge. ——— (2016) Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary, New York: Routledge. ——— (2017) Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival Through Novels, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor (1995) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Van Bouchaute, Sarah and Van Bruaene, Anne-Laure (2017) ‘Rederijkers, Kannenkijkers: Drinking and Drunkenness in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Low Countries’, Early Modern Low Countries 1, 1: 1–29. Van Gennep, Arnold (1992) The Rites of Passage, Chicago, IL: University of ­Chicago Press. Watson, Donald G. (1979) ‘Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and the Spirit of Carnival’, Renaissance Quarterly 32, 3: 333–353. Welsford, Enid (1935) The Fool, London: Faber and Faber. Willeford, William (1969) The Fool and His Sceptre, London: Edward Arnold Ltd. Wood, Christopher (2000) The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, New York: Zone Books.

5 The subversion of subversion Critique unto infinity in the ‘social’ media Tom Boland

Introduction: infinite subversion To explore critique within social media is to encounter infinite subversion. This is first because there is no limit to the field of explicitly critical commentary, regarding obvious themes such as gender, class, race and environment but extending to pervade diet, health, age and so forth. Critique diffuses swiftly, imitatively, through the empty spaces of the internet, so that each critique is critiqued or subverted in turn. Nothing is immune to subversion, yet the infinitude of subversion means that being subverted is not definitive or decisive but only a prelude to the redeployment or redirection of critique as counter subversion. All is subverted, but, thereby, subversion is subverted, leading to aporia, void and stasis. Initially internet spaces are a visual overload, with a cacophony of texts and images which describe and criticise a plethora of social issues. Voices respond relentlessly to each other, sometimes via discontinuities, shifts of frame and platform, time and space, making the conversation difficult if not impossible to follow. Furthermore, the whole discursive space only makes sense through a critical ontology, whereby power, oppression, hegemony and ideology must be assumed to be real and revealed, by each contributor, who is then debunked in turn; this critical episteme constitutes the possibility of discourse, though nothing is beyond dispute! Incrementally, these myriad texts build up an image: the social world is a negative and damaging place, full of injustice and lies. These aspects permeate culture and thought so profoundly that almost any aspect of culture can be oppressive, anyone’s thoughts and being can be problematic. Yet, amid this tyranny and delusion, there is an emergent movement of thought, the critique of injustice and the subversion of hegemony. Resonances with Zoroastrian apocalyptic thinking, Old Testament Prophecy and Gnostic secret knowledge are obvious (Cohn 1993; Voegelin 2001; Boland and Clogher 2017). Similarly to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism (1998), this is the negation of the negation, the attempt to eliminate suffering by rejecting the world and/or attempting to create utopia. Importantly, this characterisation includes both or any ‘sides’ within these debates. While socialism has most clearly apocalyptic overtones with

The subversion of subversion  93 its revolutionary ‘Last Judgement’ and future utopia of communism, these tropes animate many other forms of critique and subversion. For instance, liberalism with the ‘overthrow of the state’ and feminism with the ‘dismantling of patriarchy’ have clear resonances and are not polar opposites, despite how they are often represented in cacophonous debates. Similarly, anti-­ feminists and the alt-right present themselves as suddenly overthrowing the tyranny of feminism, finally, after years or decades of suffering (Nagle 2017). Comparing these movements is anathema to many, precisely because they exist as symbolic opposites and constitutive ‘others’ within critical ­discourse and are often ontologically distinguished by commentators as ‘ideology’ and ‘critique’. However, these claims and accusations are mutual and ­reciprocal – surely they cannot all be correct. Perhaps a more straightforward means of distinguishing between them is attending less to their claims about truth or reality, which are both imitative and diametrically opposed, but attending to their critical ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 2001); a peculiar ‘truth-game’ in which the veracity of any statement is evidenced primarily by its subversion of other beliefs or values. Examples are multitudinous, particularly about nature, desire, sexuality, humanity, individuality and so forth. For instance, it can be claimed that gender is a social construct and is innate biology, and that personal agency regarding desires, sex and bodies supersedes any such limitations as nature or nurture. While many particularistic claims were made and critiqued, and the critique countered and subverted, incrementally, certain value claims emerge, around liberty of choice, freedom from hierarchy or lies, empowerment of the individual to speak. In short, the value at the heart of critique and subversion is that of the individual in isolation from society, a being in the void, unconstrained and unconnected. Effectively, the values of subversion are eventually the absence of any concrete, historical ways of being. Thus, the infinity of critique echoes from an existential embrace of the zero, a leap into the void (Horvath 2013). Yet, even within this ‘echo-chamber’, the exhaustion and circularity of critique becomes evident and the possibility of meaning persists, indestructible, despite being subverted. Of course, on a less theoretical level, the digital ethnography of subversion throws up a vast skein of empirical material, which requires detailed analysis. Yet this existential interpellation to speak into the void, the incitement to critique and subversion in turn must be acknowledged as overlaying this whole arena of discourse. The relentless and expanding range of subversion and critique reflects the impossibility of establishing frames for understanding reality, the failure of horizons to fuse, the disintegration of shared meaning: in anthropological terms, it is a zone of schismogenesis (Bateson 1958), generating a sort of schizoid refusal to acknowledge other’s frames, which is mimetically replicated (Horvath 2013). Understanding this scene requires very cautious methods, where method refers not just to scientific techniques but a road or a way to proceed, without being drawn into the conflict nor simply to disdain it from a distance, smugly, superiorly, a standard reaction of ironic critics (Sloterdijk 1988).

94  Tom Boland

Which version of subversion? Before proceeding further, it is important to clarify the theoretical terms of this paper, especially critique and subversion. As Felski (2016) notes, critique and subversion are generally heroised and idealised in modernity, and even Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of critique returned swiftly to an endorsement of critique and political revolt (2011). However, the approach taken here repositions critique and subversion not as ideals or methods but as problems for investigation. The result is not a critique of subversion or a subversion of critique, a circularity amounting to aporia, but an anthropological perspective. Critique and subversion are not identical, although they are often intertwined. To subvert means to refuse authority and order, to transgress limits or established customs – as outlined at length in the editors’ introduction. Critique is derived from the Greek word kritikos (Koselleck 2006) and often means to judge, yet this version critique has been subverted, and in modernity critique is epitomised by ‘unmasking’ of any authority, judge or custom. For Baehr (2018), there are three elements to critique: first to accuse one’s opponent of error or injustice, then to reduce their position to being symptomatic of their ‘ideology’ and finally to ‘weaponise’ their discourse against them – curiously, this procedure is oriented to emancipating or enlightening others. Thus, critique is less about ‘judgement’ than it is about the subversion of others’ truth claims – and thus critique and subversion are something of a continuum; spanning accusation, denunciation, condemnation, exposure, unmasking, deconstruction, debunking, satire, parody, irreverence, scepticism and cynicism. The long genealogy of critical discourse and subversive practices have been noted, but a full historical reconstruction is challenging and impossible here, and instead, these terms may be better specified through anthropological theories. Most prominently, liminality facilitates or even compels critique and subversion. As described by Turner (1969, 1985), rituals involve the suspension of structures, allowing for transgression and questioning order and the taken for granted. Ordinarily, such possibilities are limited, and order is restored through meaningful symbolic performances, but chronic or permanent liminality can lead to the generation of continuous critical discourse and subversive practices (Boland 2013). Clearly, the public sphere and social media platforms provide a liminal zone, which incites constant critique and subversion, without any hope for an eventual resolution. Interminable liminality means that subjects are ‘stuck’ in the in-between, without clear status yet gripped by stasis: and ‘stasis’ here is a term which here means more than just unmoving but the exact replication and cancelling out of opposing forces. Rites of passage, particularly initiation rites, serve to transform individuals, yet often these transformations can be incomplete, so that subjects become denizens of the liminal, inhabitants of anti-structure or void. In this respect, they may come to resemble tricksters,

The subversion of subversion  95 detached and calculating, yet unleashing desires without any customary social limits (Radin 1976; Hyde 2008). Both the position of the polemical critic or ‘moral terrorist’ and the jaded ironic subversive cynic can be seen as versions of the trickster. Beyond these classic anthropological conceptions, Horvath’s (2015) work on metallurgy and alchemy is helpful here. Rituals involve breaking down existing structures in order to refashion them in other ways and transforming subjects, closely equivalent to practices of smelting which emerged in Bronze Age civilisation, whereby rocks were made to suffer by fire to break them down to extract ore, which when melted could be turned into virtually any shape. Interestingly, tools and weapons were made using moulds which were the inverse of the desired shape, a sort of absence or void, into which the transformed, molten materials were poured. Rather than whittling or knapping natural materials, the process is destructive and artificial, wherein nature becomes ‘plastic’ as it were. Yet the outcomes of these processes far exceeded the strength and versatility of any other. But what can this tell us of subversion? First, the metallurgical approach is to break things down to their constituent elements, anatomising life and society, so that the fuller history and meaning of culture disintegrates into isolated particles. This is a very real dimension of internet critique as readers are cajoled to ‘check themselves’ and examine every aspect of their background, behaviour and belief, with hostile suspicion. Second, metallurgy involves transformation – and that is precisely what is desired; emancipation, enlightenment, utopia, of society as a whole if possible but also of each individual. Possibly metallurgy and alchemy historically infiltrate into modern conceptions of liminality: certainly purification and transformation by suffering – and even by fire – is metaphorically deep-seated in Judeo-Christian theology (Le Goff 1984). Other anthropological elements will be introduced within the analysis: for instance, schism, imitation and the ‘poisoned chalice’ of critique as a gift (Argyrou 2013). Finally, it is worthwhile considering the anthropological dimension of critique and subversion in terms of language. Effectively, the truth of critique is established negatively, not simply through attention to suffering, inequality and ideology but through contesting and refusing other truth claims. While little genuine engagement or discourse occurs on social media platforms, a critique is recognisably such because it negates another truth claim. Beyond this, it ‘exposes’ the frame of others’ truth claims as social frames, as contingent, arbitrary beliefs, social constructions, with the implication of falsehood. Beyond being schismatic as noted earlier, this means that critique also opens up a void within language, because it suggests that all words are mere symbols, all accounts are merely narratives and all truth is merely a ‘social construct’. Thus critique implies its own subversion as any assertion may be criticised in turn. So, subversion is the liminal practice of de-structured individuals, rendered as tricksters by the metallurgical processes of atomisation and

96  Tom Boland analysis. The infinity of critique is guaranteed by the void it performatively creates. The technological interface of social media has a peculiarly ‘divinising’ effect on the critic, making them the judge of all things, yet all the while subverting all cultural standards. The automatic masking effect of speaking through an avatar renders the individual consubstantial with their words and nothing else, part of the echoing void, a disembodied voice; pure reason crying in the wilderness.

Method and methodology The empirical basis for this chapter is drawn from social media platforms, namely, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, particularly comments and posts, some of which were links to more permanent websites – US and UK sources predominated here, and most if not all contributions were from native English speakers. All material was and is publicly available, and derived from searches with the simple keywords ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’, carried out in February and March 2018 for an hour to two hours per day. The ‘saturation point’ within the data is hard to assess; there always seems to be something new, but the discourse is intensely repetitive; yet the degree to which critical slogans can be mimicked and retooled is always surprising. For instance, on March 10 an alt-right figurehead associate told the Front ­National that ‘history is on our side’ – subverting the Marxist meaning which has proliferated in use by feminism and the LGBTQ+ movement; ‘The right side of history’ or ‘Time’s up!’ are prominent contemporary slogans. Initially this might seem like ‘content analysis’ of the ‘media’, but it is more apt to consider this as digital ethnography because the interface of the s­ ocial media platform creates a very particular experience, and the researcher is not simply a neutral and ‘detached observer’: even if researchers do not intend ‘participant observation’ these sites and their critiques distinctively address all observers as the public, as persons who should be concerned. ­Arguably, this research method is inescapably auto-ethnographic, because in the ­moment of encountering this content, one is discursively constituted as part of the public, part of the echoing void around the cacophony of critique. Furthermore, no internet citations are given for sources, first because authorship is muddied due to the use of avatars and second because being drawn into the cacophony of critique is to be avoided by following an ethnographic rather than documentary approach in the burgeoning field of digital ethnography (Murthy 2008). Method here also becomes an ethic of research, where ‘method’ refers to a way, an ethos (Keohane et al. 2014). Not being drawn into the welter of accusation and counterclaim requires a certain degree of discipline and good ­humour, and sustained engagement with these sites entails more than just the ordinary fatigue of work but exposes one to constant interpellation, both positively and negatively, by terms which idealise the critic or condemn the ideologue. Maintaining equanimity and magnanimity is difficult

The subversion of subversion  97 as each faction frames reality and oneself differently, demanding allegiance from observers and contempt for opponents; it is frankly difficult not to tire of both sides and all commentators. Therefore, it was methodologically expedient to divide the research process between trawling the platforms and gathering material, then copying this to word processing files, either in screenshot or in text-only form. Turning the cacophony off by disconnecting from the internet was a relief, yet simultaneously, the urge to return was a constant temptation. There is no neutral position from which to observe this space, yet a full description of one’s ‘subject-position’ would also be a fruitless indulgence. In terms of ‘insider/outsider’ dynamics, I was familiar with the broad terrain of these social media platforms from a longer bout of ethnographic ­observation from the previous summer, and I received excellent guidance from younger students on how to navigate and understand these sites. Politically, I would position myself firmly as a ‘feminist’ and receive recognition as such by my feminist and female colleagues and students, but I have learnt this appellation means relatively little in itself; there are more varieties and differences among feminists and their opposites than this article can ­mention – and similarly among ‘anti-feminists’ and other critics. Unsurprisingly, no volume of subversion or critique convinced me that ‘patriarchy’ and ‘feminazis’ were equally real or injurious, and despite the constant exhortations of each post or comment, I did not feel ‘educated’ let alone ‘emancipated’ or ‘enlightened’ after any session of digital ethnography. While the following sections discuss the research in-depth, this lack of a real intellectual or political experience is an interesting finding in itself, perhaps indicating the vacuity of subversion or social media.

Disembodied experiences While much of this analysis necessarily focusses on the content of websites and social media platforms, such texts, images and sounds are not the whole story; there are obviously a vast number of ‘content producers’, users, avatars, contributors, and commentators. The visible signs of their presence will be our main concern, yet their experiences of articulating critique or subverting others’ discourses on social media needs further attention, beyond neurological studies of its consequences for the brain (Carr 2011). Obviously, the experience of critique online, unmasking others, parodying or ‘deconstructing’ their beliefs and being accused of ideology or delusion in turn is very varied. Furthermore, the picture is muddied by the vast variety of different social media platforms, which provide different interfaces for commenting, sharing and responding by way of ‘likes’ and suchlike. Beyond this, social media cancels spatial differences, and while UK and US users predominate in many sites, there are also contributors who mention their residence outside this context. So, with caution about over-­generalising from my limited experience, I can offer only a singular

98  Tom Boland ethnography of social media critique – and even within that, my interlocuters and the topic of our debate will remain unspecified. I post rarely in social media, but on occasion I share some of my academic or public outputs on a personal or professionally oriented page. Largely my ‘content’ is ignored, or treated to a simple ‘like’. However, on some occasions, comments have criticised me, not only pointing out factual errors or shoddy writing but also through accusatory unmasking, revealing me as being delusional or ideological. Whether I was wrong or right is not important here; what matters is to understand the experience of seeing one’s words being criticised or subverted, which is visible to all other users of the platform. Of course, many comments are not critiques, and some are not quite critiques but demurrals or reminders about the relevance of other issues. There are many variations of critiques, not just one genuine ‘Critique’, but nonetheless being critiqued is a concrete experience. To be critiqued on social media is to see words appear which contest one’s own assertions about values or reality, not just factually but revealing them as deliberate propaganda or unacknowledged ideology. As Baehr (2018) points out, the impulse of critique is towards emancipation or enlightenment, but such sudden epiphanies are probably rare, and perhaps only exist in the story that critics tell themselves about their practices. At minimum, critique is a sort of attack on one’s claims, but one which appears to twist one’s words, a calumny or slander; generally it invites imitation, particularly of negative emotions, feelings of impatience, disdain or anger. Quickly, such a critique gives rise to an imitative counter-critique, one which feels like a justified act of righteous vengeance against an unprovoked attack. The possibility rarely strikes us that one’s own words might have been experienced as a critique, an accusation, a calumny. Like the protestations of most parties to any conflict, it is always the opponents who started it, whereas we were only acting in self-defence. Few responses to critics begin with an apology for any offense caused. From there, critique and counter-critique begin to proliferate, partly replicating the general problem of critique within any argument; that is, the impulse to unmask the other as ideological prevents a pluralistic dialogue (Baehr 2017), or the difficulty of ‘establishing equivalences’ or even sticking to the same debate makes agreement impossible (Boltanski 1997, 2011). Rather than the public sphere being a space wherein communication oriented towards ­mutual understanding produces solidarity and shared values, as Habermas suggests (1987), the dynamic of mutual accusation, denunciation and unmasking leads to a rift that can scarcely be addressed through ‘rational discourse’. Instead, the argument breaks off, and relations can hardly be ­restored by the logical reconciliation of differences, but through gift-­relations, interpreting the other’s words generously, forgiving the other (Mauss 2000). Yet within social media there are added dimensions which exacerbate the spiral of critique. Obviously, there is the lack of personal presence, which narrows the possibility of recognising the other’s emotional state. More

The subversion of subversion  99 importantly, the platform retains and displays all comments, and gives notifications of any further comments. Following McLuhan (1964), if the media are extensions of man, then social media manifests one’s identity and convictions in a permanent and public register of critique and counter-critique. Staring at text, reading swiftly, composing counter-critiques, one becomes almost disembodied and equivalent to one’s avatar or username on that platform; your self-representation is your identity. All the while, these representations are acutely visible, to friends and others, who may respond or type comments, and any editing or deleting of posts is also manifestly obvious. Thus, one is drawn further and further into a position of vulnerability as one’s words are under scrutiny by critics and other spectators, which often provokes a resort to strident polemic, sceptical unmasking, defensive cynicism or derogatory insults. Furthermore, the use of unmasking or deconstructive critique which posits any cultural belief as merely a fiction also leads to haunting doubts about one’s own position; yet in the situation of battle, this leads not to reflection, ambiguity or nuance but appears as a potential weakness which must be covered over through redoubled attack. Occasionally, in such situations I even realised that my intention was merely wrathful, my critique mainly a performance, and that I had little hope of changing interlocuters’ opinions, only ‘point-scoring’ in a conflict with neither rules nor conclusion. Incrementally, critical posts generate a self-fulfilling interpretation of one’s opponent. Whatever values, beliefs or assessments of reality are being contested is not really decisive here; basically, one’s truth claims are being unjustly unmasked by the other and nothing else could be stronger proof of their truth and of the fallacy of the other’s position. Yet the opponent feels exactly the same way, except in reverse. Every critique offered on each side leads not to the conversion but to the entrenchment of the other. The product of critique is not enlightenment, emancipation or even dialogue but more critique. If the discussion leads anywhere else, it is because critique is only one part of discourse, and shared ideas, symbols and conversational practices persist despite the relentless spectacle of critique. The extraordinary length and repetitiveness of many of the threads I ­encountered in my digital ethnography of Reddit certainly evidenced this – one might speculate that a text-generating algorithm might produce quite credible simulations of the ‘debate’. However, the point here is not to condemn the critical debate but to acknowledge and understand it; all parties to this digital ‘war of all against all’ start out with ‘good intentions’ and have heartfelt beliefs. Before analysing these in detail, and to avoid a sort of intellectualist scorn of their critique, it is important to recognise the experiential basis of critique on social media and that no one is immune to it; this auto-ethnographic reflection is also a confession: I have critiqued, unmasked and accused others in anger, ungenerously, full of pride and in arrogant certainty of my own righteousness and cleverness. My apologies again to my interlocuters; hopefully the unpleasantness of our arguments can lead to more generous understanding.

100  Tom Boland

Language The volume and intensity of voices within social media critique is accompanied by the deployment of special terminology, ranging from academic terms to internally generated jargon, to modifications of ordinary language. These phrases describe, mediate, performatively generate and grapple with the peculiar experiences and practices of subversion within social media. Most prominently, there are numerous terms which are connected to power, for instance, ‘oppression’ or ‘privilege’, others around debate such as ‘freespeech’, ‘bigoted’, ‘own’ and ‘gotcha’ – many of these phrases refer to but also exemplify the gladiatorial style of put-downs within arguments, or highlight a paucity of genuine engagement. There are also a great and varied series of slurs thrown between each side: for instance, ‘power trip’, ‘trollers’, ‘keyboard warriors’ and so forth. Specialised insults have been crafted for positions imagined by critics, for instance ‘sjw’ – social justice warriors, for feminist zealotry, or ‘notallmenz’ for non-feminists who constantly quibble about its critical generalisations. A complete guide to this terminology is beyond the scope of this chapter and would quickly become outdated – besides these are not terms with lexically fixed definitions but highly contested and weaponised critiques of the other. Of course, this language is deployed within a highly abrasive context (Philips 2015). The use of satire and parody is frequent in posts, and sarcasm is almost a default tone; the ability to ‘get’ a joke becomes a signal of group membership. For instance, one Tumblr post compares Men and Trash under the following criteria: ‘Is easy to dump; Is always there for you; Screams at you when you kick it to the curb’, with Trash outperforming men except in the last category – the post ends with two quips ‘Men aren’t Trash’ and ‘I can’t just keep on insulting Trash like this’. Implicitly the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek, and those who feel insulted should realise it is ‘only joking’ (Lockyer and Pickering 2008). But, within the joke, there is, supposedly, an important political point about ‘male entitlement’ and gendered expectations around dating behaviour; these elements are unpicked and debated within comments thereafter, and humour swiftly gives way to invective and accusation, variously invoking ‘snowflakes’, ‘male fragility’, ‘double standards’ and so forth. After extensive ethnography, these various terms become relatively ­familiar; though their usage in comment threads is hardly consistent, the deployment or interpretation of these terms is a clear indicator of community involvement or acceptable politics. What becomes clear is that these terms retranslate or refigure everyday life. For instance, a post on Reddit asked how an inconsequential incident between two six year olds at school could be rendered as a ‘teachable moment’ – that is an opportunity for ‘consciousness raising’. The resultant discussion between several contributors used the following terms: bodily autonomy, power structures, agency, reaffirming inherent rights, unresolvable and dangerous, and crossing lines of

The subversion of subversion  101 consent, and ended in various references to a famous rape trial. The incident was simply that a six-year-old girl leaned over and a six-year-old boy ‘kissed her butt’, and was duly reprimanded by the teacher. Critical discourse is not the only academic transference into this discussion as commentators made reference to psychological theories of children’s early learning of gender roles and ‘poor impulse control’. The incident and its discussion seem utterly trivial, yet these tendencies are worth noting as they evidence the alchemical dissolution of ordinary judgement, as represented by the classroom teacher who mildly reprimanded the boy and informed parents. Since critique can ‘discover’ oppression and ‘teachable moments’ here, there are no limits which protect this childish incident from being entangled in intense and schismatic political debates. The intensity of this battle over language is evident to those involved in social media debates; language is ‘weaponised’; for instance, the anti-feminist blogger ‘feministcringes’ collects and reposts the worst or most excessive instances of feminism they can locate, accompanied by ungenerous interpretations. Even within each ‘side’ of the debate, this contest over language and truth becomes very strongly apparent. For instance, an article entitled ‘Why feminism needs to be trans positive’ is replete with complex formulations of its own position by contrast to the anti-trans, ‘transphobic’, or ‘transmisogynistic’ discourses of others, which are exposed as sophistic wordplay and reduced to ideology. Lest this content disturb readers, the article is preceded by a ‘trigger warning’ about ‘anti-trans slurs’. So, implicitly the words of other commentators who are named and included as ‘feminists’ – albeit as less ­enlightened feminists – are at once erroneous ideology and potentially damaging. Thus, this ‘war of words’ is not just ephemeral, but the very centre of this politics of truth, wherein the truth claims, even the critical truth claims of others, must be subverted. Exonyms, a Greek term for the naming of others, are important symbolic or political tools; for instance, in the foregoing article the ‘trans-positive’ feminists label their opponents as ‘TERFs’ (Trans-­ Exclusionary Radical Feminists). A pluralistic debate where all voices are respected and enter dialogue is virtually impossible because the discourse of TERFs is, in advance, considered as harmful or even ‘hate speech’. Moreover, the unlimited character of subversion means that these texts critique even the critical language of their adversaries. An easy target is the simple phrase ‘womanhood’ or those who are ‘born that way’, which is considered a form of ‘gender essentialism’ in that this form of feminism is oppressive because ‘the boundaries of womanhood are policed’. Furthermore, the TERF’s claims are registered not as genuine but as a form of ‘authenticity war’ – the other is idealising or romanticist, even in their moment of critique. Beyond this the article cites supposedly ‘TERF’ feminists who claim that ‘trans’ politics is a problematic form of ‘cultural appropriation’, a term derived from struggles around ethnicity, but suggest that this is an ‘arbitrary and inaccurate categorisation’, yet within this welter of critical accusations no authority for ‘truth’ is possible – even critique only generates

102  Tom Boland ‘truth’ through disrupting other’s claims. Eventually, the article dismisses the TERF feminists as fake critics, whose ideology is wrapped up in a cloak of feminist rhetoric but is actually harmful and problematic. Plainly there is no resolution whatsoever to this ‘turf/terf’ war but a cycle of revenge. In turn, such extensive critiques are subverted by simple memes by non- or anti-feminist women, who claim that feminism oppresses, silences or devalues their experience as a woman – along the way adopting the language of ‘social justice’ so that feminism appears as organised tyranny, and talk becomes oppression. The suffusion of these terms into everyday language is also evidenced in the ‘comments’ below these articles; critique is not the preserve of specialised aficionados. Terms like ‘gender fluid’, ‘call-out’, ‘mansplaining’ and ‘toxic’ are common currency. Methodologically, a digital ethnography cannot ascertain actual experiences, yet the uses of language seem to be transformative on the level of being; for instance, one commentator said that they were a woman, despite having a man’s body and having made no ‘trans’ adjustments to that body; furthermore I think its transphobic and sexist to assume I have privilege because I am treated like a man. Internally I don’t respond to this privilege like a man. I respond to it like a woman, so it actually feels like the opposite of privilege. Possibly this was a deliberate irony, a reductio ad absurdum, yet it is taken at face value for discussion by other posters, so while we cannot ascertain the intentions of the author, it represents legitimate and meaningful discourse within these spaces. Therein, autonomous self-determination of the meaning of personhood, experience and society supersedes any other definitions. Either we must take this at ‘face value’ or acknowledge that words completely reconfigure this experience of identity – performatively cancelling everyday culture. Such an analysis is not intended to critically reveal the ‘reality’ obscured by this curious declaration but to acknowledge the peculiar process of inverse interpellation, whereby critique renders the subject other or even opposite to how they are defined socially. Contra Althusser’s (1971) idea of interpellation of hailing and constituting the subject through the power of discourse, the adaption of subversion to all culture produces inverse interpellation, wherein subjects refuse and reverse all identities which are applied to them; those called oppressive now declare that they are subversive critics.

Subversions Using this language, a vast variety of critiques are possible: most plainly, there are critiques of gender norms, for instance, a cartoon which illustrates that boys can have a variety of stereotypically ‘feminine’ traits, from

The subversion of subversion  103 caring to being pretty. These critiques which subvert the ‘narrowness’ of socialisation are then expanded unto oppositions towards oppression, for instance, in an article which highlights that many girls have been cat-called before the age of ten. Such critiques seem quite unobjectionable – although objections nonetheless proliferate in the comments sections, for instance, the ‘revelation’ of masculinity or sexualisation as biological inevitability. Deploying the same language and critical ontology, there are also feminist arguments in favour of practices of sexual submissiveness, which is justified because it can be engaged with as a matter of choice and is thereby ­‘empowering’ – although somewhat subverting existing feminist critiques of gender roles. Obviously, such an argument can also be reversed, using much the same terminology, deconstructing submissiveness as a symptom of patriarchy. Similarly, the critique of ‘cat-calling’ was reversed by commentators who ‘unmasked’ the authors as being part of a ‘new puritanism’, who overstated their case. Finally, the cartoon about the emotional range of boys was considered by some anti-feminist critics as a form of social engineering, a feminist authoritarianism which imposed alien or inauthentic emotions on children. Similarly, critique is directly articulated by anti-feminist commentators. For instance, a simple critique of hypocrisy is offered in a cartoon which depicts women ignoring a college stand for STEM courses in favour of ‘Women’s studies’ then subsequently mounting a protest against the sexism of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). Or in a sort of critique of critique, a cartoon depiction of everyday suburban American life is re-envisioned through the red-tinged glasses of a feminist, so that a clothes shop becomes ‘fat-shaming’, a conversation becomes ‘mansplaining’, and an ordinary greeting becomes ‘sexual harassment’. Here, these anti-feminist critics represent their opponents as delusional and refigure their supposed inspiration as fake, as ‘false enlightenment’ – an accusation which is reciprocated in turn. Within these spaces there appears to be an infinity of possible subversions, the critique of everything and the subversion of critique, until it appears to matter very little what anyone, anywhere says about anything. Yet there are a number of interesting elements to this cacophony of critique. Much of the content of social media addresses an unknown public, and while it responds to ongoing involvement in critique and debate, generally it is apropos of nothing in particular. Broadly content is positioned as an unsolicited gift, even explicitly as a ‘public service announcement’, ‘newsflash’ or a ‘timely reminder’ or through colloquial expressions such as ‘just saying’ and ‘y’all should know’. Often the content of the ‘newsflash’ is blindingly obvious; for instance, several posters explained that ‘pro-choice’ does not mean indiscriminately ‘pro-abortion’, and doubtlessly few needed such an ‘explainer’. Yet these sassy memes respond to constant polemics against their own values and beliefs, but in responding they reframe their ‘pro-life’ opponents as idiotic, and the contesting frames of ‘reproductive health’ versus ‘sanctity of life’ are never reconciled, especially via the medium of

104  Tom Boland the ‘news flash’. Indeed, the hostility inherent in these communications surely entrenches these opponents, or at least performatively reiterates an opposition. While almost anything can be subverted, this levelling renders all and any parts of society and culture as broad equivalents; that is, practically anything produced in society is implicitly a social construct, perhaps a choice, perhaps imposed by oppression depending on the political persuasions of the critic. For instance, a rough cartoon drawing on Tumblr of a naked white woman and a Muslim woman wearing a hijab states: ‘Nudity empowers some. Modesty empowers some. Different things empower different women and it’s not your place to tell her which one it is’. The line drawing is implicitly an ‘empowered’ resistance to controlling attitudes to gender, to male hegemony and to ethnocentric standards which might pretend to decide in advance what is ‘empowering’. Thus anything or everything which is chosen is ‘empowering’ – a sort of liberal version of emancipation, coupled with a critique of any social standards or customs around dress. Most interestingly here, nudity, which has not really been a Western tradition for millennia, and customary Islamic costume are made equivalent, levelled into being identical embodiments of ‘empowerment’. Thus, culture and society is reduced into an atomised aggregation of choices. Another tension within this drawing and its accompanying statement is that it attempts to persuade the general public of a particular point of view, whilst paradoxically validating all and any choices; the democratic conception of the volonté générale is traduced to the volonté de tous (Dean 2016). Another recursive reiteration of subversion encountered was around a discussion of marriage on a Reddit thread: the original post posed the question ‘Do you think Marriage should disappear as a social institution?’ Various replies emerged with a range of critical responses, ranging from a libertarian assertion that marriage was nothing more than a legal contract which should have no special standing, to critiques of marriage as ‘heteronormative’ unjustly reserved for heterosexual couples. Other critics were willing to endorse and retain marriage so long as it was open to any gendered relationships as a good legal protection for joint custody over children, medical decisions and inheritance rights. Yet subversion of ‘traditional marriage’ was subverted in turn by proponents of polyamory, who regarded marriage as a form of legal ‘privilege’, that is, a negative, exclusionary, hierarchical exercise of state power. One commentator provided a link to another site which gave a critical account of two-person relationships and even of overly conventional polyamory, clearly seeking to educate or even emancipate their interlocuters. As the argument proceeds, not only do these critics, both implicitly feminist and progressive, disagree on the issue, but they critique each other: one saying the other’s assertions are ‘a bit of a stretch’, while the idea that marriage being restricted to pairs provokes the other to say: ‘I have no words to express how ridiculously insensitive that comes off’. Not only does the dialogue collapse into critique and counter-critique, but no new

The subversion of subversion  105 institution or ideal is promoted, only the erosion or disintegration of those which exist; a sort of fulfilment of the early Marx’s promise of ‘the relentless criticism of all that exists’. While there is some conservative defence of traditional marriage and suchlike by anti-feminist commentators, there is no shortage of anti-­institutional critique. For instance, there is the unmasking of ‘bogus notions of chivalry’ or any special respect for women or mothers or of monogamy, which is often rendered as an artificial impediment to natural sexual desire, which is figured as voracious but repressed by ‘victorianism’ or the ‘new Puritanism’, an ever-more exaggerated version of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ discussed by Foucault (1976). To an extent, the incitement to speak about the self is replicated and accentuated here; certainly contributors are not reticent to convey passionately held opinions or divulge details of personal experiences. In this sense, subversion is productive, of discourse to the point of cacophony and of forms of subjectivity, yet this profusion of speech is also strikingly repetitive and imitative, not just within groups but across political cleavages, a rhetorical ‘arms race’ of sorts. Considered in this manner, the circulation of critique is a form of levelling subversion, which Argyrou (2013) describes as the gift of a void, adapting Mauss’s anthropology of gift-relations to explore the gift of thought. For Argyrou Western thought has this consequence because it is colonial, whereby the spread of ‘enlightenment reason’ erases other forms of culture and wisdom through violence and oppression. Yet critique is not just an unequal and unsolicited gift but also one which takes away even as it is given; not just because it is an empty package but because it is a poisoned chalice which reduces all thought and culture either to power or to meaninglessness. Of course, accusations of colonialism, racism and ethnocentricism seeped into the digital ethnography of feminism and anti-feminism, and it is important to be cautious about the reduction of Western culture to deconstructivist reason or unmasking critique. However, Argyrou’s point about the problematic nature of critique as a gift is worth exploring. The ‘gift’ of critique, whilst it can be a ‘gesture of solidarity’ to some, generally targets others; the delusionary dupes of ideology, with whom it has either no relationship or a direct antagonism. Furthermore, the ‘gift’ of critique is usually negative, revealing lies, inequality and suffering; it attempts the negation of the negation. For instance, one post runs: ‘Things to normalize: gay parents, female masturbation, they/them pronouns, breast feeding, guys showing emotion, periods, women in positions of power’. Of course, many readers will agree with some or most of these elements, but this list is not a menu but a critique with the underpinning logic that each of these elements has been suppressed by patriarchy. This ‘normalisation’ might be a return to tradition in some cases – like breastfeeding – but a break from it in others – they/them pronouns (for non-binary genders). Mentioning elements within this list publicly breaches of norms of modesty in certain cultures, but here, free speech and critique implicitly overrule such caveats.

106  Tom Boland So, while this list is unexceptional and hardly provocative today, it performs a sort of ‘colonialism’ by demanding ‘liberation’ regarding gender. But most importantly, it does not even really ‘normalise’ anything, because the constitutive grounds of the list is the subversion of contemporary ‘oppressive’ norms – it is implicitly provisional and unlimited. This is not to defend current ‘­modern’ ‘western’ norms around gender, for instance, dichotomous binaries, hyper-sexualisation, technologisation of childbirth and parenting; rather, it is to reconsider them as resulting from accumulations of historical subversion, perhaps as far back as the beginning of agrarian civilisation (Horvath and Szakolczai 2018), and to suggest that more ‘liberation’ only reduces custom and meaning, rather than replacing it. For instance, one address to the void begins ‘Dear women who claim that equality has been achieved’ which, as stated earlier, is not really the start of a conversation but a prologue to a harangue wherein frames simply do not intersect. The post continues, ‘you have not achieved equality unless you can travel ANYWHERE in the world and still make the same claim…. Equality does not exist for you unless you are equal all over the world’ and provides a list of activities which are prohibited elsewhere, from serious matters such as the right to work or education to being allowed to wear make-up. Of course, analysing this as ‘colonial’ may appear like a relativistic endorsement of hierarchical domination elsewhere, but the point here is to observe how custom and culture is translated into the liminal terms of ‘equality’.

The exhaustion of subversion Even within these social media platforms, a sense of fatigue surrounding this continuous impetus to subvert was clearly present. Generally, politicised critiques were strident and emancipatory, but each side also often expressed exasperation at the continuous refusal of others to accept or acknowledge their pronouncements, remarking at the persistent ignorance and stubborn and wilful self-delusion of their opponents. The tendency of social media platforms to generate conflict and critique was also articulated, for instance: ‘Tumblr:*sees a perfectly normal post about a perfectly normal thing. Tumblr: What mental gymnastics can I use to make this about shitting on straight people, white people or men?’ For this commentator, ‘normal posts’ are being drawn problematically into the exchange of hostilities. Yet, while this post expresses fatigue with Tumblr politics, it does so via a critique, translating the ‘truth’ of others into ‘mental gymnastics’ a form of fabrication or fabulation. Ethnographically, it is worth noting, however, that much of the rest of this contributor’s posts were pornographic and implicitly a subversion of ‘rigid’ or ‘puritan’ conventions around modesty and self-presentation. Nevertheless, the problem of repeating or imitating the hostile tone and polemical style of these internet critiques was also highlighted by some commentators. For instance, one commentator stated their ethic explicitly:

The subversion of subversion  107 ‘My reaction to others’ hate, bigotry and misinformation will not include anger or hate. For me the path is lit with curiosity, listening, correcting the record when possible’. Avoiding the cycle of anger and hatred is certainly worthwhile, as are the virtues of curiosity and listening, although in a ­Girardian cycle of vengeance, each side always views the other as hateful and angry, the aggressor against the wronged defender. Furthermore, the simple recourse to ‘correcting the record’ as an antidote to ‘misinformation’ is not necessarily a panacea; it presumes that facts ‘speak for themselves’ or at the very least that there is more or less ‘reality congruent knowledge’ (­K ilminster 2015). However, the spiralling profusion of different frames in social media, each of which subverts the other’s account, cannot be resolved here by factual accuracy. Indeed, despairing of the sphere of constant politicised polemic was also in itself alloyed with critiques. For instance, a poster, who described themselves as having once been a ‘nice-fem’, declared that they were finally renouncing all ‘trans-activism’ and ‘identitarian ideology’, and that they could no longer persevere among the many ‘lib-fems’ who were still ‘handmaidens’ to this ‘mindfuckery’. The proliferation of outlandish terms here – ­including ­m isogynistic, patriarchy, bigot, transphobe, ideology, ideocratic, identitarian, cognitive dissonance, tyranny and liberation – is used to describe the ‘Orwellian’ authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies of others’ critique. The irony is that Orwell’s essays and novels constantly draw attention to the political problem of the coining and proliferation of new jargon. Emancipation from one ideological system here seems like submersion into another, living through a verbose series of categories which express intense hostility towards the other, alongside a reassertion of one’s own virtue.

Conclusion: forgive us our subversion? If subversion has no limit and there is nothing beyond critique, then what becomes of thought and language? Is there anything but cacophony at play? Certainly, there is no refuge or asylum, no unassailable position, not even in the critique of critique or the subversion of subversion. Perhaps silence is the only wisdom. However, within Western culture, there is a distinctive and meaningful response which can guide our response to the welter of accusation and calumny of the contemporary public sphere; forgiveness. An ethic of forgiveness means a refusal of the impulse for revenge but not only that; it means foregoing judgement, not setting oneself up as a critic of others. The challenge of forgiveness also means pardoning the unforgiveable, ­particularly transgressions for which there has been no apology or contrition (­Szablowinski 2010). Furthermore, the ethic of forgiveness also means a readiness to ­confess one’s own part, to be contrite and willing to admit imperfection. To ask and give forgiveness puts an end to the limitless cycle of resentment (Girard 1987).

108  Tom Boland Finally, we turn to the axiom of Pascal: to forgive is to understand. I­ nstead of being critical and judgemental, it is possible to be interpretative and forgiving. Even our opponents have their reasons and their values, perhaps with virtues warped by excessive desire, but there is some kernel of meaning behind even the most outrageous politics. Rather than criticising and subverting, it is necessary to love our enemies, or if we cannot, then following Oscar Wilde, ‘Always forgive your enemies, nothing else annoys them so much’.

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The subversion of subversion  109 Jacobsen, Michael H., Drake, Michael S., Keohane, Kieran and Petersen, Anders (eds.) (2014) Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences: Creativity, Poetics and Rhetoric in Social Research, Farnham: Ashgate. Kilminster, Richard (2011) ‘Norbert Elias’s Post-philosophical Sociology: From ‘Critique’ to Detachment’, in N. Gabriel and S. Mennell (eds) Norbert Elias and Figurational Sociology, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Koselleck, Reinhardt (2006) ‘Crisis’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67, 2: 357–400. Le Goff, Jacques (1984) The Invention of Purgatory, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lockyer, Sharon, and Pickering, Michael (2008) ‘You Must Be Joking: The Sociological ­Critique of Humour and Comic Media’, Sociology Compass 2, 3: 808–820. Mauss, Marcel (2000) The Gift, London: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media, London: McGraw-Hill. Murthy, Dhiraj (2008) ‘Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research’, Sociology 42, 5: 837–855. Nagle, Angela (2017) Kill All Normies: From 4Chan to Donald Trump and the AltRight, London: Zero books. Nietzsche, Frederich (1998) Beyond Good and Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Philips, Whitney (2015) This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Radin, Paul (1976) The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, New York: Schocken Books. Sloterdijk, Peter (1988) Critique of Cynical Reason, London: Verso. Szablowinski, Zenon (2010) ‘Between Forgiveness and Unforgiveness’, The Heythrop Journal 51, 3: 471–482. Szakolczai, Arpad (2013) Comedy and the Public Sphere: The Re-birth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena, London: Routledge. Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, London: Routledge. Turner, Victor (1985) On the Edge of the Bush, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Voegelin, Eric (2001) Israel and Revelation, Missouri: University of Missouri Press.

6 Subversion and conversion From revolutionary communism to dissidence Harald Wydra

With its normative focus on justification political enquiry has too easily ­neglected the extent to which the pursuit freedom can subvert existing authority. In the face of accelerating modernisation and the totalitarian threat in the early 20th century a series of writers engaged with subversion and the need to safeguard obligations of the soul. Reflecting on the massive social and political changes after the First World War French writer Albert Camus described the rebel (L’homme revolté) as somebody who seeks emancipation both by breaking moral obligations against metaphysics and by subverting hierarchies of rule and social convention in concrete historical action (Camus 2000). Camus rejected metaphysical rebellion because its self-­ proclaimed humanism declared ‘the solitude of man and the nonexistence of any kind of morality’ as objective and absolute. In reality, such revolt would create a new divinity that would not only obey the imagination of human desires but whose realisation would often entail mass murder and terror. Camus declared that ‘it seems to me impossible to imagine a renaissance for Europe that does not take into consideration the claims made by Simone Weil’. For Weil unbridled modernisation was subversive in the sense that collective political agency transformed human beings by means of transgressing moral boundaries. In her treatise ‘The Need for Roots’ (L’enracinement) Weil (1949) had diagnosed two major large-scale processes of uprooting, one being ‘False Greatness’ and the other referring to the uprooting of workers in the name of unbridled capitalism and the nation-state. False greatness is based on the divinisation of an earthly collective. The internal corruption of a political body had already been formulated in Plato’s Great Beast (in the sixth book of the Republic) but would attain a much more fundamental scale in modernity. Prefacing her work with a declaration of the needs of the soul her fundamental point refers to the restoration of a sense of reality and of truth. Two decades before Camus – whose original was published in 1951 and one decade before Weil (who finished her initially unpublished manuscript shortly before her death in 1943) Spanish philosopher José Ortega y

Subversion and conversion  111 Gasset  identified subversion as the Revolt of the Masses. According to ­Ortega the perfection of social organisation developed in the 19th century made mass-man (hombre-masa) perceive the state of things not as a human artefact but as natural. In the uprisings provoked by scarcity, the popular masses seek bread but the means they use is to destroy the bakershops (­Ortega y Gasset 1998: 173). Regardless of whether one is a self-­ proclaimed reactionary or a revolutionary, one thinks to be in possession of limitless rights, which would justify either the salvation of the fatherland or the liberation of the workers in the name of social justice. Such subversive attitudes would disguise the fundamental urge to let go of any obligation, such as courtesy, veracity, or the respect of higher individuals (Ortega y Gasset 1998: 286–287). For the aforementioned thinkers the social and political engineering of ideological constructs inspired by different variants of ‘humanism’ would not only subvert traditional hierarchies and authority but also uproot people from their home, memory, sense of belonging, and the relationship with truth. Social life and political order are of course never fixed or completely balanced. Each society undergoes liminality, which refers to the incommensurability within the fluidity of social hierarchies, the lack of solid ground, and the existential in-between. In ordinary times generational change, rites of passage, reforms, elections, or other forms of political uncertainty create some form of balance and measure. Before this background revolutionary communism in Russia was undoubtedly among the most significant examples of subversion of political order in history. Rising practically from nothing, the Bolsheviks toppled the provisional government and would establish a political monopoly which later profoundly transformed an agrarian society into an industrialised country and a military superpower. Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak grasped this very poignantly in his Doctor Zhivago: This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its cause. It doesn’t start at the beginning, it starts in the middle, not at any premeditated time, simply on the first weekday that comes along, right in the middle of the rush hour. (Pasternak 2002: 177–178) Communist subversion was a denial of reality in different ways. It produced a self-declared ‘proletarian’ revolution in a country with hardly any capitalists or proletarians. Like other modern revolutionary ideologies Bolshevik communism was inspired by messianic expectations that would enforce their own sectarian vision of redemption. This merger of programmes of salvation largely accounts for why an atheistic ideology would be successful in deeply religious, orthodox country (Berdyaev 1961). The Bolsheviks presented themselves as

112  Harald Wydra a ‘transformer class’ which aspired to emancipate their own backward society, which they nevertheless despised and from which they were increasingly alienated. If an outsider sect can rise to the centre stage during moments of liminal weakness and engineer all-an encompassing reality on the basis of subversion, is there any way to restore a sense of reality? When the ­Soviet Union suddenly collapsed in the early 1990s, scholary interest in the forms of power that might have undermined communism was replaced by an urgent focus on future types of social and political organisation. For anybody interested in phenomena of power, this oversight is lamentable, if not dramatic. Subsequently, I propose that subversion nevertheless offers opportunities for non-subversive forms of power to restore a sense of reality. This chapter explores ways how dissident movements in the context of late communist Eastern Europe retrieved obligations of the soul in pursuit of a life in truth in the face of communist power. In particular I shall draw on the crucial distinction made by German social theorist Heinrich Popitz between instrumental power and the form of internal power that seeks orientation through the need for yardsticks of certainty (Maßstabsbedürftigkeit) (­Popitz 1992).1 Revolutionary subversion used instrumental power in order to increase threat potential and to extend this across society in order to stretch such threats. Popitz thematised the instrumental power of threats in achieving conformity and thus producing reliable results in subverting power. He showed that the power of threatening depends on their rentability (Rentabilität) and their potential of being stretched (Dehnbarkeit). Even the modern state with its unprecedented power of disciplining requires for its stability that transgressions of norms are spaced out in time. The greatest threat to a state is arguably a revolution, which typically constitutes a bundle of threats that occur simultaneously. In Popitz’s view, the actor who is excessively ready to use conflict will react very sharply and hectically to even minor provocations (Popitz 1992: 96). He is distinguished by his readiness to risk, the inclination to put everything at stake at each occasion. He signals from the start that he is very little inclined to strike compromises. Each dispute threatens to drive up in an endless spiral of conflicts. The revolutionary subversion in Russia entailed a massive civil war and great social convulsions which can be summarised in two metaphors: the Soviet industrial revolution resulted in a ‘car pulled by a horse’, while the urban revolution led to ‘cities without citizens’ (Wydra 2007: 127). The persistent uncertainty about the revolution’s survival partly explains why it is possible to extend the revolutionary period up to the late 1930s (Fitzpatrick 2001: 3–4). Beyond the creation of a new society, communism was an assault on the basis of human dignity and human coexistence. This was shown in the literary works of Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Miłosz, Havel, or John Paul II. According to Vasily Grossmann, the violence of a totalitarian state is so great as to be no longer a means to an end. It becomes an object of mystical adoration and worship (Quoted in Wydra 2007: 125).

Subversion and conversion  113 Engaging with central aspects of the thought of Czech dissident Václav Havel and the idea of self-defence (samoobrona) of Polish dissidence, this chapter explores possibilities for conversion within subverted forms of reality. Conversion is usually understood as the process of changing or causing something to change from one form to another, often referring to one’s religion or beliefs or the action of persuading someone else to change theirs. In Christian theology, in particular, conversion is associated with a spiritual renewal including repentance and change in accordance with ethical prescriptions and the good. Whilst dissident thought has family resemblances with Christian ideas, I shall argue that conversion as one particular obligation of the soul can be understood as a form of power. According to Popitz even total and absolute power must accept the antinomy of perfection of power (Popitz 1992: 59–60). The absolute violence of tyranny is limited by the physical threat of an assassin or the moral resistance of a martyr. The key point is not to praise yet another form of resistance strategy or gauge its likelihood of political success. Rather it is to show that the total power of killing limits power of people over people. Power is always incomplete as you cannot monopolise the extreme act. Everybody can kill and one cannot take away the decision to self-sacrifice. Precisely because the revolutionary origins of communist power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe made resistance by means of a revolutionary overthrow of a power centre nonsensical, conversion would become a form of power without threat potential at the level of instrumental power. Dissidence took on the existential challenge of withdrawing from social life structured by the correct line of communist doctrine, the schismatic split of people’s minds, and the systematic de-humanisation of social relations. The crucial point is that whilst conversion was not a political strategy driven by an ideology or a project of social engineering, its anti-political spirit became a powerful threat to communism. Dissidence recognised that evil must be measured by some good, which could satisfy people’s need for yardsticks of certainty and the restoration of a sense of reality. Drawing on key ideas of Mohandas Gandhi’s ideas about truth-force, I shall explore how key aspects of subversion – such as its inherent mimetism, its overemphasis of ultimate ends, and the logic of sacrifice through instrumental power – can be met by existential attitudes of conversion.

The mimetic structure of subversion Subversion is inherently mimetic because it potentially reciprocates the means it actually sets out to resist. As a tactic of resistance it aims to realise its noble ends by instrumental power and therefore falls into the trap of imitating the power it sets out to undermine, overthrow, or topple. Revolutionary violence will provoke counterrevolution, which in turn will require the revolutionaries to make use of the force of the state. Whilst in his treatise State and Revolution (written in August 1917 in Finnish exile) Lenin had

114  Harald Wydra promised a withering away of the state, only some months later his revolutionaries would unleash the Red Terror and turn the Tsarist Army into the Red Army for the purpose of winning the civil war. It is therefore more appropriate to understand this type of combat, in Clausewitz’s terms, as a reciprocal spiral of rising to extremes, which is inherently mimetic, as shown by René Girard (Girard 2010). Nietzsche formulated this risk of mimetic imitation quite generally in Beyond Good and Evil. ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you’ (Nietzsche 1997, Vol. 2: 636). In reality, the intoxicating promise of a new freedom could not conceal that the dictatorship of the proletariat produced an internalisation of violence (Mayer 2000). It is worthwhile juxtaposing Lenin’s approach to one of his exact contemporaries, the Indian political activist Mohandas Gandhi, who was born in 1869, just one year before Lenin, and whose non-violent fight for self-rule in India is often seen as revolutionary, albeit not as subversion but rather as inducing conversion. Gandhi’s politics are perhaps the most well-known form of passive resistance that informed processes leading to India’s independent statehood from the hands of the British Empire (Bonduran 1958; Gandhi 2009). Gandhi was acutely aware of the mimetic subversion in case ­Indians liberated themselves by force or would be given self-­government by the British. Such a self-government would produce Englistan, not ­Hindustan, ‘­English rule without the English’, ‘the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger’ ­(Gandhi 2009: 27). It was clear to Gandhi that what you get out of a struggle depends upon what you put into it. The risk is that violence as a means becomes an end in itself, thus perpetuating violence endlessly. ­Gandhi’s solution is radical. In his conception, power is not just an outcome but something malleable and ongoing that is always in the making. He extended the horizon of politics beyond the immediate time horizon as the last word is never spoken in politics (Conrad 2006: 84–88). Gandhi’s views about breaking the spiral of retaliation relied upon a deep sense of moral obligation towards fellow human beings, expressed in his idea of truth-force (satyagraha). Satyagraha derives from the Sanskrit word Satya (truth, being) and agraha (steadfastiness) meaning literally ‘holding on to truth’. Gandhi defines satyagraha-atmabal (passive resistance or soul force) as a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force … If I do not obey the law, and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self. (Gandhi 2009: 88–89) Gandhi’s spiritual alternative draws not on a naïve proposal. Rather, it requires an unprecedented, even inhuman degree of responsibility and measure in the political struggle.

Subversion and conversion  115 Using Max Weber’s famous categories of ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility, the ethics of revolutionary communism would elude such responsibility. Their ultimate aim of a transition to a perfect society would be seen as the undisputed truth of historical evolution. This dogmatic reductionism of life into an ideological fantasy of how life evolves would justify any means to produce this end. The quest for ultimate ends can therefore be dangerous and destructive. As Polish dissident Adam Michnik put it in his reflections on the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement, ….every revolution is unfinished or betrayed, and does not bring about the punishment of sinners and the gratification of the virtuous. And may the good Lord save us from revolutions that truly balance vice and virtue and become completed. The completion signifies a guillotine or a firing squad. The compensation for suffered harm invariably brings new harm, often more cruel than what came before….Whoever wants ultimate justice should remember that only executions are ultimate. (Michnik 2011: 34) And yet, paradoxically, violence may not be the final word. Max Weber had recognised that the subversive nature of mimetic violence that tends to reproduce can always create alternative demands of brotherly, non-violent ethics. The general universal experience that violence always engenders violence from within itself, that everywhere social and economic interests of domination (Herrschaftsinteressen) become bedfellows with the most ideal reform – and most complete revolutionary movements, that application of violence against injustice, in the final result, does not lead to the victory of the party closer to law but of the greater power and prudence, all that does not remain hidden at least to the strata of the apolitical intellectuals (Schicht der intellektuellen Nichtinteressenten) which continuously engenders new, most radical demands of brotherly ethics: do not resist evil with violence, which Buddhism and Jesus’s sermon of the mount share. (Weber 1980: 357)

The means of anti-politics The Polish experience may be taken as an empirical example for a non-­ violent form of resistance. When the first non-communist government was established in Poland in August 1989, it was the end of a process of non-­ violent dissidence that evolved throughout decades. In August 1980, the shipyard cities of Gdańsk and Szczeciń saw the rise of massive workers’ protests that demanded the establishment of independent and self-­governing trade unions. Solidarity did not emerge out of the blue. Its constitution was

116  Harald Wydra the culminating point of discourse, actions, and programmatic statements that had appeared in different sections of society already in the 1950s. The Polish cycle of crises between 1956 and 1980 would also be called ‘Poland’s permanent revolution’. The term ‘revolution’ here, however, needs to be adjusted to meanings that generated as an existential attitude to historical experience. The Polish turn towards a self-limiting revolution under Solidarity in 1980 can indeed be read as a long-term conversion. Eastern European dissidence suggests that human beings are free to respond to subversion and repression not only by the same means – that is vengeance and striking back – but also by reciprocating differently. If ­subversion of reality is a deeply transformative process affecting mind, body, emotions, and memory, why may such experiences not generate new attitudes of resistance capable of breaking the spirals of vengeance and retaliation? In revolutionary crowds or lynch mobs there is little that would save individual self-restraint against mimetically following the massive build-up of the desire for retaliation. As Popitz has argued, internal power does not need to operate with external advantages or disadvantages. It is a form of power that elicits a compliant readiness to follow even though actions cannot be controlled (Popitz 1992: 28). It is important in this context to remind ourselves of Weber’s definition according to which ‘power means every chance within a social relationship to impose one’s own will even against resistance, regardless on what this chance rests’. He specifies that all imaginable qualities of a person and all imaginable constellations can enable someone to impose his will in a given situation (Weber 1980: 28–30). If we reflect Popitz’s insights in the light of Gandhi’s satyagraha, it is clear that truth is unknowable and inaccessible in a final sense. Often, political idealism risks sliding into rationalisations of political violence. As Gandhi put it: ‘Few men are wantonly wicked. The most heinous and most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under cover of religion or equally other nobles motive’ (Quoted in Mantena 2012: 458). Especially when the proclaimed ends do not materialise in the real world, the insistence on the moral goodness of the principles and ends may increase the need for coercion. It can be safely argued that dissidence was not an ethic of ultimate ends (Gesinnungsethik) in the sense of justifying the means by the ends. Its means were, so to speak, ends in the making because dissidence was goalless. In the logic of subversion a considerable threat potential is required. The threat potential of dissidence in this sense was close to zero. Even the massive public appeal of Solidarity in Poland dispensed with such threat potential. And yet, the key role the working class played in a Soviet-type regime made this workers’ movement so critically dangerous to the commnist regime. Born in a series of massive strikes at shipyards in the north of the country during August 1980, Solidarity became a massive national movement, which assembled nearly 10 million people over the course of three months during 1980. It was self-defensive and self-limiting in the sense that its protests aimed to ensure rights for a self-governing and independent trade union. During

Subversion and conversion  117 the general strike on 3 October 1980 Jacek Kuroń could declare Solidarity was simply Poland. According to Michnik, the Solidarity revolution was preceded by the miracle of the election of the Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyła, to Pope John Paul II, in 1978 and his visit to Poland in 1979. The other significant symbol of the recognition of the self-limiting revolution abroad was the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to union leader Lech Wałęsa in 1983. The motivations of dissidence were decidedly anti-political from start to end. Their ends were not targeted on political power in the state but rather change peoples’ approach to reality, recovering existential ground from the fantasy world and false reality created by communist rituals. Dissidents had no master plan, not even an identifiable group of leaders. If dissidence had been a strategic undertaking of resistance with a clearly defined political purpose, a group of militant followers, and a programme of action, then it could either fail or succeed. Its success, for instance, would then be interpreted as some kind of determination, wisdom, if not redemptive power to produce freedom. We tend to forget, however, that dissidence does not have this overarching appeal. As an attitude it is fundamentally divisive. In his essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’, Vaclav Havel refers to this term in quotation marks because Western journalists invented this term in order to express that dissidents had a vested interest in something they shared as a group. However, as Havel put it, it is not a profession; nobody decides to become a dissident. Rather, it is an existential attitude; one is thrown into it. The word dissidence has three meanings. It means ‘to sit apart, to be divided, separate, or remote from’. It also means ‘to disagree, to think differently’. Finally, it means ‘to be unlike, different, or dissimilar’. Havel therefore sums up that a ‘dissident’ means something like a renegade or a heretic. As Leszek Kołakowski has outlined, heresy concerns ideological conflict, the application of tolerance or the inclusion of dissenters (Kołakowski 2010) The Greek word haireo means ‘to take’, and the reflective form ‘haireomai’ means ‘to choose’. Heresy, therefore, suggests a choice or an act of choosing. The question of heresy is essentially about whether to follow one’s own choice irrespective of the Church’s leadership, doctrine, and God’s guidance. However Havel insists that dissidents do not deny or reject anything. On the contrary, ‘they have tried to affirm their own human identity. If they reject anything it is what was false and alienating in their lives, i.e. living within a lie’ (Havel 1985: 58). In normal settings of professional life or social communities, it is not a very enticing prospect to be considered a dissident voice. Yet, since the first part of the 20th century, regime critics from regime critics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to South African leader ­Nelson Mandela or former Burmese dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi became prominent in exposing unjust force. Yet the list of those who never lived to see their dreams realised is much longer. It would, for instance, include a­ nti-Hitler resistant activists such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Helmut James Graf von Moltke, or Sophie and Hans Scholl.

118  Harald Wydra Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia pursued truth, not power. Yet truth was not based on one exclusive version of the objective truth. Truth is necessarily many-sided, with each individual having their own paths to truth. As Havel said about truth: Its power, therefore, does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were – that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm and entire division. (Havel 1985: 42) It is difficult to measure the likelihood of success of such a bacteriological weapon. Yet, it is safe to assume that even the most oppressive and pervasive relations of domination allow a significant degree of personal freedom. This is, as Georg Simmel realised long ago, beyond the imagination of many as the demonstration of such weakness of power demands sacrifice, which is out of the question (Simmel 1958: 102). Dissidence – precisely because of the lack of the capacity to institutionalise their goals – drew on politics of conscience which demanded a certain degree of self-sacrifice. Firmly grounded in their own identity, some people consider it worth risking the game of change where the stakes are all or nothing. To uncover the sacrificial and ‘inhuman’ logic of communism it requires not a sacrificial but a self-sacrificial logic. Truth-force or soul-force means ‘action on behalf of others’, which implies a possibility between strategic collision and motionless communication (Conrad 1996: 137–138). The powerlessness of dissidence might indeed disqualify it as a political movement. Following Gandhi, however, we have to stop thinking in terms of a distinction between means and ends. We have to imagine a continuum, not a mechanistic distinction between abstract concepts. As Gandhi says, ‘there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree’ (Gandhi 2009: 79). We can actually use a temporary goal as a means of fighting and then abandon it. Or we can fight without a specific goal at the outset, and hope that our way of fighting will allow one to emerge. Charter 77 addressed the hidden sphere, trying to unmask the real nature of power. As Havel put it: they do not assume a messianic role; they are not a social avant-garde or elite that alone knows best, and whose task it is to “raise the consciousness” of the “unconscious” masses … Nor do they want to lead anyone.

Subversion and conversion  119 They leave it up to each individual to decide what he will or will not take from their experience and work. (Havel 1985: 105–106) Our way of fighting should itself bear the integrity (and purity) we would like to achieve in the outcome of the struggle.

Conversion as a form of authority A critic could of course argue that the existential option of pursuing the ‘good’ might have been outdated; inefficient; and, after all, nothing more than sterile excitement. Conversion experiences may be seen as clumsy and unpredictable, a charge the existential approach is always exposed to. Nietzsche’s thoughts in ‘Daybreak’ (Morgenröte) grasp this misrecognition by the world who may consider such experiences as delusions or utter stupidity. Live through what you want: those who do not wish you well see in your experience a motive to diminish you! Experience the deepest subversions of your mind and of your Erkenntnis and reach – like a reconvalescent with a painful smile out into freedom and light silence – there will be someone to say “this one here deems his illness an argument, his powerlessness as the proof of powerlessness of all; he is vain enough to fall ill so that he feels the overweight of the suffering”’. And given that somebody explodes his own chains and by doing so gets hurt; so another one will scorn him. “How great is his clumsiness” he will say. This is the fate of a man who is used to his chains and is sufficiently foolish to tear them apart (Nietzsche, Vol. 1, 1997: 1240–1241) Nietzsche’s reflections fit quite well what could be called dissidence’s clumsiness in tearing apart one’s chains. The price paid by dissidence was oblivion, scorn, and ridicule. Solidarity underwent self-lacerating conflicts, and Polish politics has been characterised ever since by having missed the closure that would have really achieved the ‘thick line’ under the past. After all, dissidents failed to convert their existential power into instrumental power and a workable programme for economic and political reform. In spite of some excitement about the discovery of civil society in Eastern Europe Western observers also showed disbelief and even aversion. One may point to two reasons for this (Benhabib 1995). One would be the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous. Simply put, the restorative enterprise of affirming authority in the name of humanism and classical values of liberal democracy including freedom, market capitalism, and value pluralism did not rhyme well with the intellectual fashions of western theorists. Whilst post-structuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern critique were anti-authoritarian and exalted the resistance movements for their courage,

120  Harald Wydra they criticised ethic individualism in Czechoslovakia or Catholic-inspired nationalism in Poland as outdated, ineffective, and politically naïve. Second, Westerners disregarded the historical experiences of what they would considered presumably ‘less developed cultures’. The main point was that rational thought and logical abstraction could not situate itself within the ground of existential reality, in which ritualised lie and distortion of common principles of coexistence had taken an iron grip on social reality. The lack of pursuit of political goals made dissidence look somehow tragic. Seeking ethical aims and thus renouncing on the political engineering of society produced great hopes but it omitted the crucial question of how to stabilise power. How could the authority that emanated from dissident become binding? The means of dissidence – by virtue of the enormous military arsenal of communist states – could not be violent. Yet just the tactics of civic disobedience or retreat into private life would not have worked. The task was twofold. First, to detach oneself from the demands of the system without attempting to resist it. Fighting communism was pursued not following some strategic self-interest but rather by going against one’s own self-interest. Not only was it an immense investment of time, loss of opportunities in professional careers, if not serving long prison sentences and exposure to public denigration. Second, there was pervasive uncertainty about the possible absurdity of one’s own resistance with no guarantee whatsoever about a possible ‘success’. This unpredictability and uncertainty, however, is part of the existential version of the political. For Gandhi, the need to endure as part of spiritual warfare required suffering. This suffering, however, is just an accident within the key virtue, which is non-violent action on behalf of others. We can follow here Jacques ­Maritain’s suggestion that Gandhi’s techniques can be clarified by the Thomistic notion that the principal act of the virtue of fortitude is not the act of attacking but that of enduring, bearing, suffering with constancy (Maritain 1951: 69). If we accept that the means are the ends in the making, they are not opposites but must be imagined as a continuum. A critic could respond here that Bolshevik revolutionaries employed precisely this endurance and the suffering to achieve their ultimate goals. Lenin’s political messianism demanded the highest degree of endurance and the revolutionary’s total self-denial; the renunciation of worldly attachment to morality and property; and the dedication of all his powers to monotonous, strictly regulated work, often without results (Schapiro 1987: 195–196). How can we ascertain the difference? Revolutionaries endure in order to rise to power by means of instrumental power. Their efforts at subversion rest on material resources and coercion, notably the politically directed restructuring of the economic bases of social life as claimed by Marxism or ‘realism’. The conversion of people in Soviet-type societies was not induced by an exisential option as a form of voluntary act of faith but rather centrally orchestrated through fanatical conformism. The fanaticism of true believers would produce distrust, denouncing, and ritualised behaviour of

Subversion and conversion  121 living the lie. Marxist-Leninist ideology discredited politics in general because its insistence on the correct line and the knowledge of historical truth made distinctions between ‘opposition’ and ‘regime’, between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ impossible. Everything regarding politics was actually apolitical since there was a political monopoly of a party that claimed to know the truth of history. There comes however a moment when the use of force cannot be defended in the name of ends, even if they are presented as noble, redemptive, and historically inevitable. The means will be used in defence of the sheer maintenance of imperial status quo. The use of force by Soviet tanks in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, for instance, meant that the emperor was naked, an argument advanced by Milovan Djilas already in 1956. During the Cold War Soviet imperialism used anti-fascism as the end to maintain the schismatic dividing line between communism and the enemy, which ran not between state and society but right through individual subjects. In Trotsky’s words, none of us wishes to be or can be right against the party. In the last instance the party is always right…One can be right only with the party and through the party, because History has not created any other way for the realisation of one’s rightness. (as quoted in Waller 1993: 58) With the absolute commitment to one single faith and one truth, sitting apart could be a dangerous, even life-threatening exercise. In Czesław ­‘Milosz’s’ words, if you were only 99% behind us you were already an enemy. Lenin’s denial of divisions between state and society and signs of internal social division went along, however, with the affirmation of a fundamental division between the People-as-One and the ‘Other’, i.e. so-called counter-­ revolutionary forces such as Tsarist order, the kulaks, or the bourgeoisie but increasingly also of inner-party opposition. The result was a representational doctrine where the People-as-One (including the party, which claimed to be identical with the proletariat) would require an imaginary Other as an enemy. This enemy was constitutive of the identity of the People-as-One but, simultaneously, it threatened its unity permanently. As Popitz suggested, beyond violence and instrumental power, there is another anthropological form of power, which is more internal than external. It refers to the fact that humans need yardsticks of certainty (MaßstabsBedürftigkeit). Such internal power requires that our confidence depend on confirmations that we are worthy of such yardsticks (Popitz 1992: 29). Those who seek markers of certainty need such demonstration of worth. A key element is here to be recognised by personalities or groups that are considered to represent such yardsticks. This is the form of dependence in which authority can be forged. There is a double process of recognition; we recognise the superiority of others as those who set the yardsticks. But we

122  Harald Wydra also strive to be recognised by those who set the yardsticks as worthy of being recognised, to receive signs of demonstration of our own worth. Dissidents escaped systematic persecution and annihilation not because the regime held such exclusive ideas in awe. Rather, the regime was very well aware that this hidden sphere, which harboured dissent, grew out of the world it addressed (Havel 1985: 59–60). A central difference between subversion and conversion concerns attitudes towards enemies. As a major study on the organisation of dissident enclaves has shown, the internal commitment to the cause of a terrorist group, for instance, is achieved by denigrating the outside world. If a black-and-white antagonism between us is systematically build up in cultural practices, it permits building a wall of virtue between saints and sinners (Douglas and Mars 2003: 775). In the case of subversive revolution, the wall of virtue defines heresy and demands extermination. Quite on the contrary, conversion is animated not by ­eradicating evil but by following the strength of a virtuous good in order to withdraw from subversion. Conversion is thus potentially inclusive of enemies, seeing them as future allies. The political element is to be found in the preventive claim to represent people who still might be bound to the ritualised lie. The crucial point, therefore, is that people’s approach to truth does not have to be mediated by instrumental power. It lies in the fact that for the latter the enemy is not there to be destroyed but he is seen as a potential ally in the fight against untruth and for truth. The threat potential of dissidence therefore could not be grounded in instrumental power. Rather, it aimed to establish new markers of orientation in a situation in which people had lost yardsticks of certainty. Truth is not an abstract idea based on rational thought. Human beings can be transformed from the inside; they can have conversion experiences. For Gandhi, for instance, the key approach to defeating evil depends on courageously withdrawing oneself from it. One has to examine one’s life in every detail, to establish how my way of life has ‘allied’ with it, and to eliminate it from my own habits, my own actions, my own thoughts and feelings. If everyone does this, evil will be starved of the life-support that it feeds on, and over time it will evaporate. The site of the quest for truth is therefore not an ideal utopia but the here and now, the mundane fabric of everyday life. As Uday Singh Mehta noted, for Gandhi, it was the everyday, even in its most banal form, that supplied ‘the very material through which one gives ethical substance to one’s life’ (Singh Mehta 2010: 358). Like the power of satyagraha, the idea of living in truth was available to everyone, everywhere, always. As Gandhi’s approach was paraphrased by Stefan Rossbach (2019): Here and now, I can examine my life, and I can withdraw whatever tacit or explicit support I may give to the concrete injustice surrounding me. My conversion will surely attract the attention of those who have vested interests in perpetuating injustice, but at the same time it may inspire others to follow my example.

Subversion and conversion  123 This quest for truth does not require the ‘elevated gravity of the political’ (Mehta), which, as Gandhi observed, always had ‘larger purposes’. However, yardstick of certainty is not based on either rational abstraction or historical precedent, as recently argued by Stefan Rossbach (Rossbach 2019), who showed that Gandhi served the role of a basanos, a touchstone. In Greek antiquity, the word basanos referred to a dark-coloured slate on which pure gold, when rubbed, left a coloured mark, helping merchants and moneychangers assess the value of the many coins circulating throughout the Aegean world. The term was also used, however, as a metaphor for a tool, instrument, or process that could reveal the truth behind appearances. In a Platonic dialogue one of Socrates’s interlocutors implies that being drawn into a conversation with Socrates was like being rubbed against a touchstone (Laches 187E–188B), making it impossible to hide the truth of one’s life. Personal recollections of conversations with Gandhi frequently reveal a similar touchstone effect. Gandhi’s presence would place the individual members of his audience in a liminal situation. They were ‘caught’ between the hope that they may be able to sustain this truer notion of themselves, and the fear that they may fail. Sometimes proud people were left embarrassed but with Gandhi’s encouragement they could search for the cause of embarrassment in themselves and thus arrive at a better, truer notion of themselves. ‘Sustaining’ means here that they succeed in allowing their heightened sense of who they could be permeate their being and their actions – that they reach out to that nobler version of themselves that they saw, dimly, reflected in Gandhi. ‘Failing’ means that they do not recognise how they are implicated in the liminality of the touchstone encounter – that the insights gained, the hope and the fear, are externalised by locating them with the agent of the touchstone effect. Gandhi, they may say, has moved them not because of the truth he helped them discover about themselves but because of some inherent integrity that he possessed and that separated him from them. Communist subversion had not only erased memories of the past but also undermined a sense of integrity for the sake of ideological prescriptions. Conversion, in this sense, meant to experience the sense of reality within the historical existence of one’s own society. In historical existence, people can learn from subversion that there is no single or exclusive path to emancipation and freedom. The ways to move individual conscience may depend on an existential event that may shake a person to the core. This existential dimension, however, is embedded in wider cultural facts, such as historical memory and meanings of events, traditions, and meanings of power. The radical nature of the (post-)totalitarian system had produced nonsensical relations that were ritualistically repeated. Moreover, Eastern European history – so dominated by foreign rule and resistance to it  – was full of attempts at subversion. In Eastern Europe such subversion concerned, for instance, earlier uprising and the consequences for these societies. In many ways, the seeds for militant non-violence or civic

124  Harald Wydra disobedience were laid during these failed revolutions. Poland’s partitions left the nation stateless for more than 120 years. After the interlude of the Second Republic 1920–39 Poland disappeared, and when it reappeared on the map in 1945, it was under the influence of the Soviet regime. Czechoslovakia had seen the defeat of 1938, the weak response to the communist takeover of 1948, and the helpless reaction to the Soviet invasion in 1968.

Subversion and conversion as existential facts Subversion of reality creates not simply a historically different context but actually an existential fact. A system based on subversion decides on one’s existence and life course. Adam Michnik, a famous Polish dissident, described his arrest by the communist authorities in 1965 at the age of 19 as the guiding motive for his entire career as a dissident entirely to the communists. ‘If there had not been communists in Poland I would not have known what to do’ (Michnik 1995: 398). Precisely because his ‘conversion’ responded to this existential background of a subversion he rejected cosmopolitan liberalism due to his grounding in Polishness: I think that if you lived in a Germany, where you had to read Thomas Mann, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hegel, or Kant in the underground, you would feel like a German in such a way that you cannot even realise. I identify in a special way with my nation (naród) because I want to identify with what is weak, beaten, and humiliated. If Poland was a superpower, I would perhaps be cosmopolitan…. But I have the impression that Poland is beaten and humiliated, the Poles are a people that is unhappy. This is why I identify with this people and with this language for the good and for the worse. And the fact that in Poland there are Poles who do not consider me a Pole but a Jew, gives the whole of my lived Polishness a higher taste. (Michnik 1995: 393) Meanings of power therefore also depend on semiotic and symbolic r­ esources that may transcend the subversion by social and ideological engineering. Concepts such as class or state may receive ‘objective’ definitions in textbooks. In reality, however, elites and the wider public attach different meanings to them across time and space. The Polish term for society (społeczeństwo), for instance, generated in opposition to foreign domination, implying that concern for society has been almost equivalent to confessing identity with the nation. Given the long periods of statelessness, ­społeczeństwo for Poles was not the object. Marxist doctrine wanted it to be. Rather, it can be regarded as a political concept. Not by accident, one of the central claims of Solidarity was the subjectivisation of the nation ­( podmiotowość społeczeństwa). In a similar vein, the concept of ‘class’ as a ‘variable’ or a transhistorical ‘structure’ that would ‘act’ has its limits in

Subversion and conversion  125 culture and life experience. For class analysis, for instance, industrial workers embody the proletariat and have a critical relationship to capitalism and its carriers. The experience of life under a communist regime belied the premises and claims of the theory, though. The case of the primary critic of state socialism from within, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, is illustrative here. His three-volume work, The Main Currents of Marxism, was published in 1978, disclosing Marxism’s character of a political religion and a belief system. He was scathed for this ‘treason’ by British socialist historian E.G. Thompson, who published an open letter in which he criticised Kołakowski for having abandoned the ideals of Marxism only because of his experience with Polish communism (Judt 2006). Kołakowski’s response lays bare the reality of inhumane subversion produced by communism. Like Marxism, the communist system subordinates the complexity of life and contingency of action to a seemingly perfect system that would solve all problems in one stroke. Still, the role of touchstone persons is to help others to measure what the good is. The touchstone role of Polish Catholicism allowed for ritualistic alternatives based on religious Christian rituals as symbols of national unity. The Great Novena was a comprehensive programme designed by the Polish Primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński to celebrate the nine years (1957–66) of run-up to the millennium of Poland’s ‘baptism’ in 966 (Osa 2003: 68–76). Although the authorities put up serious obstacles, for the forthcoming decades the Great Novena generated more solidarity among Poles. Ritual reverence of the Madonna established public visibility and moral pressure on the communist regime. The message of ritual processions was that while the body can be seized, the spirit of Our Lady is always with us. Such ritual celebrations were not political in the sense of protest but rather because they expressed obligations to a different type of reality. A further decisive step was the first visit of Pope John Paul II to his native country in June 1979, which became a ‘dress rehearsal’ for Solidarity one year later. Polish citizens self-organised the whole visit, consisting mainly of mass services assembling millions of people. Although dissidence in Poland in the early 1970s seemed to be the rule, not the exception, the very constitution of a strike movement in the shipyards in the north of the country in July and August 1980 could not have occurred without a series of other unexpected events. The strike waves at the Gdańsk shipyard in summer 1980 were not ‘caused’ either by KOR, the intelligentsia, or the Catholic Church. They were rather a spontaneous response to the projected price increases for meat, to dismissals of workers such as Anna Walentynowicz from the Gdańsk shipyard but also to the spiritual power of Havel’s essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’. As Zbigniew Bujak, later on a prominent Solidarnosc activist, remembered: ‘this essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road….Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later,

126  Harald Wydra in August 1980 – it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement’. Bujak saw in the ultimate victories of Solidarity and Charter 77 an ‘astonishing fulfilment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay’ (Wydra 2001: 39). An existential attitude of conversion has a more acute sense of reality. Dissidence carried inner weight due to the fact that earlier defeats made the excessive price of violence and suffering a crucial factor in the question what type of obligation is required when restoring yardsticks of certainty. Good and evil are not Manichean opposites. Conversion aims to change the markers of certainty at the personal level. It is more open-ended about truth in the sense that it requires reflection, intuition, and integrity. It is never acceptable that the ends justify the means. They are not moralising in the sense that they would purify the world from sinners or wrongdoers. By analogy, Havel makes the point that ‘living in truth is …woven directly into the texture of living a lie’ (Havel 1985: 41). The good and the predisposition of people to the truth are the background against which living a lie makes any sense: it exists because of that background, … it is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. The power of truth is not something we can quantify in the confrontation of numbers in the institutional world. Rather it occurs on the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. Conversion, however, is also an epistemic event that takes into account great shifts in human self-understanding. According to anthropologist René Girard, the major epistemic event in human history has been the revelation of the biblical texts. It was not only a revelation of the nature of God but primarily the transformation of sacrifice from the conviction that scapegoats are truly guilt to the realisation that victims are innocent (Wydra 2008). It brought about a conversion, originally in the followers of Jesus and later among the first Christians, which rectified the misrecognition that had been characteristic of archaic sacrifice. Instrumental power follows a sacrificial logic because domination (Herrschaft) requires the coercive use of violence to impose one’s will. Conversion is often associated with transformations in the belief system or the goals that characterise believers. Not by chance, leaders such as Socrates, Jesus, or Gandhi conveyed a message which was subversive to the system of hierarchies and conventions. Still, conversion does not fall into the trap of mimetic violence in the name of ultimate ends to be realised by instrumental power. Subversion and conversion cannot be understood as a relationship of cause and effect. The ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are indeed connected but not like one would see a programme of resistance being connected to the power it resists. Rather, conversion is self-transformation through a quest ignited by mistakes,

Subversion and conversion  127 exclusions, or wrongdoings. What matters is not to resist power self-­righteously with the aim to debunk existing authority with instrumental power. Rather, it is to resist collectivist logic. A collective we-identity is always in ­danger of suppressing individual elements in the service of an ideological formula or a fanatical belief. It undermines personal conscience and moral responsibility. A parallel to this is found in Karl Jaspers’s Die Schuldfrage, where the German philosopher in early 1946 dwelt upon the different forms of guilt afflicting Germans after total collapse in 1945 (Jaspers 1996). All genuine conversion occurs within singular being, in numerous person, regardless of each other or in moving exchange.2 Jaspers vehemently rejected the charge of a collective guilt of Germans because he knew that the Nazis had built their subversive authority on the idea of Volksgemeinschaft, which would promote racial inclusivity and exclusivity because it projected the image of a strong, prosperous, dominant, and united against enemies at home and abroad (Kershaw 2014: 33–34). The Volksgemeinschaft transformed the spirit of 1914 as it excluded Jews and turned an inclusive nationalism into exclusive racism, claiming a sizeable group of Gemeinschaftsfremde (community aliens) as a threat to Germans. With the outbreak of the war in 1939 such racialised Volksgemeinschaft would be turned into a Kampfgemeinschaft fighting for its very existence. Many ordinary Germans who did not share the anti-­ Semitism of Nazi ideology would nevertheless succumb to ‘the ­dichotomous “us-them” wartime thinking that the Jew, already dehumanised … was an enemy threat … and had to be destroyed’ (Browning 2014: 225). Much like the abstract, lifeless fantasy of a Volksgemeinschaft in Germany, the abstractions and ideological prescriptions of communist subversion had concealed the interconnectedness of good and evil, truth and lie. Solidarity’s revolution or living in truth in Czechoslovakia was therefore not the cause for neutralising communist subversion. One has to admit that in daily practice, conversion also required compromise. When open violence and systematic repression subsided, switching faces, doublethink, self-censorship, and forms of dissimulation increased (Kharkhordin 1999). Even those critical of the regime had assimilated behaviour patterns and attitudes they identified and criticised in the communists. Michnik described the Polish double bind in the sense that the non-negotiable aspirations of Poles to freedom and self-determination must be realised in such a way that military intervention would hurt the Soviets more than refraining would. The horizon of the whole Solidarity movement in 1980 could be expressed by the belief in some form of broad autonomy and democratic liberties existing within the Brezhnev doctrine. (Michnik 2011: 26–27) This iron grip on social reality was one of the reasons for dissidence to stay within the rule of law.

128  Harald Wydra Nevertheless, dissidence raised awareness that even though subversion may be evil, such evil is the background experience for measuring the good. The evil is not absolute but it is indeed connected to the ‘good’. Even though conditions may be hopeless there is the possibility to mobilise the forces of the good. There was considerable risk and backlashes involved. Following the Prague Spring in August 1968, many dissidents had to subsist in menial jobs, if not spending years in prison such as Havel himself. Similarly, after the declaration of martial law in December 1981 many prominent Solidarity members had to serve long prison sentences. They resisted early temptations to strike back against martial law by violence. Even after the declaration of martial in December 1981, the spirit of Solidarity was maintained throughout the 1980s under the shelter of rituals of mass services in small parishes, gatherings for prayers, or displays of semiotic and visual relics of Solidarity. Such rituals of the image of Solidarity came to prominent display during Pope John Paul II visits in 1983 and 1987. The process of mobilisation must not engage in the forms of instrumental power and threat potential that is implemented by subversion. What could become the ‘good’ that would bind the spirits of people, creating conversion experiences? The Catholic Church had – for at least a century – spoken truth to power and given Poles hope to endure foreign rule. The marker of orientation that might guide people who are betwixt and between in liminality is, according to John Paul II, the good that opposes evil. In his reflections on communism and Nazism as ideologies of evil Pope John Paul II had a different take on a reconstruction of the temptation to totalitarian solutions. The first line of argument suggested that with enlightenment thought, man became alone, alone as the source and creator of his own history and his own civilisation. Man is alone as someone who decides on what is good and what is evil as the one who ought to exist and act as if God did not exist (John Paul II 2005: 18–19). John Paul II traces this development back to the Cartesian revolution. Cogito, ergo sum did subordinate the concern for esse (being) to the concern for ens cogitans (a thinking existence) (John Paul II 2005: 16–17). The science of pure thought transforms ideas about being (esse) and about the existence of creator; now being, creation, or nature become the content, if not functions, of human consciousness. Philosophy started to deal with human beings only to the extent as they were content of human consciousness rather than to the extent that they really exist outside human consciousness. A second point is that the measurement for evil is always the good. Weber called this the ethical irrationality of the world. The very existence of justifications of God (theodicy) in major world religions testifies to the dilemma that the good does not exist without evil and that the existence of evil requires justifications. John Paul II’s reflections that the age of rationalisation, technology, and materialism rejects God will become the measure of defining the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’. The devil, according to Goethe, is ‘ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft’

Subversion and conversion  129 (Faust, Act 1, Scene 3). In these lines, the measurement for the ideologies of evil is in the very Good. John Paul recalls that after the Second World War he thought that if Nazism lasted 12 years and then collapsed it would be reasonable to think that God had given this bestial system ‘just’ 12 years. If communism lasted longer there must have been some sense in it. Pope John Paul II reported a conversation with a young Flemish priest, which he had met shortly after the end of the Second World War. The Flemish priest said: The Lord decided that the experience of this evil, which is communism, should fall upon you. Why? The West was spared this experience perhaps because it could possibly not bear out such a trial, whereas you will stand this trial. (John Paul II 2005: 53–54) John Paul II dwells on the much richer heritage of Christendom, civilisation, and progress that is found in Western Europe. Yet, concomitantly, he points out that it was Western philosophy that imagined and put into work a world that could work on the assumption that ‘God didn’t exist’. In John Paul II’s view, the fundamental point in the Flemish priest’s suggestion is the potential for self-defence against the attack of the communist evil, which targeted freedom, human dignity, and national independence. Whilst John Paul II acknowledged the lower degree of rationalistic-technological civilisation he claimed the greater resourcefulness in spirituality for Poland.

Conclusion If power aims to grow and become omnipotent, logics of subversion are often used in order to create a collectivist movement that is focussed on an ultimate end that would justify any means. One of Plato’s central problems concerned the ways democracy in Athens was subverted by the rise of demagoguery, sophism, and a growing culture of lies which had grown on the back of the loss of moderation and measure as the imperial quest for more power had drawn Athens into a self-destructive war with Sparta. Hannah Arendt lucidly outlined why tyranny will be self-defeating in the long run. Its modern hybrid child, totalitarianism, will make all efforts to abolish diversity and therefore will tend to entropy. This will stifle initiative, curiosity, and innovation. The dynamic of new life by natality is therefore the greatest enemy of such total power. If the forces of subversion are to be kept under control, people must have faith in a positive force. This positive force is not in the threat potential that would use instrumental power. The effects of imitation and the tendency to create enemies that have to be eliminated are too high a risk. It would only perpetuate processes of subversion. Paradoxically, then, the upshot of dissident conversion is that goallessness and giving up on an ultimate end could expose not only repression but also the logic of subversion.

130  Harald Wydra

Notes 1 See also the new translation into English of Popitz’s classic book (Popitz 2017). The work of Popitz was also extensively discussed in two issues of International Political Anthropology (November 2017 and May 2018). 2 ‘Alle wirkliche Verwandlung geschieht durch Einzelne, in zahlreichen ­Einzelnen, unabhängig voneinander oder in bewegendem Austausch’ (Jaspers 70).

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Subversion and conversion  131 Mayer, Arno (2000) The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian ­Revolutions, Princeton University Press. Michnik, Adam (1995) Diabeł naszego czasu, Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnictwa. Michnik, Adam (2011) In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe, ­Berkeley: University of California Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997) Werke, Vols 1 and 2, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Ortega y Gasset, José (1998 [1929]) La rebelión de las masas, Madrid: Castalia. Osa, Maryjane (2003) Solidarity and Contention, Networks of Polish Opposition, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Pasternak, Boris (2002 [1958]) Doctor Zhivago, London: Vintage. Popitz, Heinrich (1992) Phänomene der Macht, Tübingen: Mohr. Popitz, Heinrich (2017) Phenomena of Power, Translated by Gianfranco Poggi. New York: Columbia University Press. Roberts, Adam and Ash, Timothy G. (2009) Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rossbach, Stefan (2017) ‘My Life is its own message: Gandhi’s integrity’, in C. Alson, R. Wiseman, and A. Carpenter (eds) Portraits of Integrity, London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2019. Schapiro, Leonard (1987) Russian Studies, New York: Viking. Simmel, Georg (1958) Soziologie, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Singh Mehta, Uday (2010) ‘Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of ­Everyday Life’, Modern Intellectual History 7, 2: 355–371. Waller, Michael (1993) The End of the Communist Power Monopoly, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Weber, Max (1980) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen: Mohr. Weil, Simone (1949) L’Enracinement, Paris: Gallimard. Wydra, Harald (2001) Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wydra, Harald (2007) Communism and the Emergence of Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wydra, Harald (2008) ‘Towards a New Anthropological Paradigm: The Challenge of Mimetic Theory’, International Political Anthropology 1, 1: 161–174.

7 The subversion of virtuous drinking John O’Brien

And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman’s life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. (Engels 1969: 105)

Isn’t it reasonable to think that men who never drink wine, whether out of naivety or on principle, are imbeciles or hypocrites – imbeciles, in other words, men unacquainted with humanity or nature, artists spurning the traditional means of art, workers blaspheming against mechanics; and hypocrites, in other words, closet guzzlers, braggarts of sobriety, drinking on the sly and keeping for themselves some occult wine? A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men. (Baudelaire 2002: 9)

Introduction Alcohol has come to be one of the major targets of public health policy. The World Health Organisation (WHO) places it as the fifth most serious risk to health globally. The burden is heavier in developed countries as a result of the tendency for consumption to rise alongside incomes, with alcohol there defined as the third most detrimental risk factor (Babor 2010). Its causal role is not direct but contributory, being an aspect of a complex set correlations, associated with negative health outcomes, such as injuries, neuropsychiatric conditions and chronic disease conditions as well as related diffuse and difficult to define social costs such as violence, interpersonal problems and productivity losses. The central goal of public health policy is an overall reduction of the level of alcohol use on the

The subversion of virtuous drinking  133 premise that all consumption involves risk, and there is no safe level of consumption; critically, the evidence is that the overall level of consumption increases the overall risk for the population. It is a policy programme that emerged in the 1960s, increasing its influence until the early 1980s when the WHO fully adopted the perspective, thereby gaining greater and greater traction over the policy programmes of governments worldwide (Butler et al. 2017: 14–16). It is a part of the long debate over how alcohol should be best regulated and managed that has plagued modern societies as they have shifted from l­ aissez-faire policies to temperance-based paternalism to prohibition and the AA-based disease model that constructed the problem as an ‘addiction’ that was a permanent affliction but one only affecting a definable portion of the population. As these policies have come to be discredited the objective of those concerned with the social and health impact of alcohol has moved towards encouraging and assisting national governments in addressing alcohol-related harm by introducing regulatory control measures across the whole population as a means of maximising health, involving policy tools for reducing availability and regulating price and marketing (Butler et al. 2017: 1). The rise to prominence of the public health perspective is significant as in epidemiology there is a traditional preoccupation, even in public health, with ‘proximate, individual-level risk factors’. The individual has been seen as the unit of epidemiological observation, based on their personal exposure to a variable and their attributes as an entity. For example, in the case of alcohol, liver cirrhosis risk is often understood purely in terms of the individual’s exposure to ethanol and their underlying physiological vulnerabilities. Thus, the epistemological presumption is that ‘populations are merely aggregates of free-range individuals’ and that studies done on this level can be used to accurately estimate overall health outcomes, ignoring the wider context of health. Early epidemiology was ‘social’ as it focussed on the link between health problems and conditions of deprivation, hazardous working conditions and urban squalor: for example with Engels’ study of Manchester factory workers and the alcohol problems that were associated with their social situation (McMichael 1999: 887–888, 891–892), and Farr’s concern in the 19th-century UK with registering the social determinants of morbidity and mortality (such as starvation and intemperance) rather than simply the immediate physical causes (Hamlin 1995). Due to the triumph of liberalism in the 19th century, the political medicine that Engels and Farr hoped would be a complement to political economy was stillborn (Hamlin 1995). Germ theory from the 1880s compounded this by reorienting epidemiology towards understanding diseases in terms of ‘a single causal infectious agent’ and ideas about the genetic determinants of health emerged through the work of Gregor Mendel, leading further to an individualistic perspective. This was exacerbated in the 1950s, in

134  John O’Brien the context of the decline of infectious diseases, when the focus shifted to chronic diseases, where the research examined ‘the role of ultimate proximate risk factors’. The emphasis is thus on collections of individuals, rather than the ‘collective’, as was drawn out for example by Durkheim (2002), who posited that the characteristics of society, in the sense of the nature of social values and social relations, effect health outcomes in the population at large (McMichael 1999: 889, 892). Thus, collective level phenomenon, where there is an interdependence of risk, related to social pathologies, became neglected. However, there has been a return of political medicine in alcohol research over the past 40 years, through the increasing importance of the public health perspective.

Alcohol and subversion The public health perspective on alcohol, much like its 19th-century antecedents, seeks to address the dangers to health that largely stem from a liberal economic and political model, based on a private, heavily concentrated alcohol industry, with considerable power over government policy, which seeks to outsource responsibility for safe drinking to individual consumers while maximising sales. However, over the course of its moves to protect citizens, another problem appears: the subversion of worldviews that provide scripts for safe and positive use of alcohol. Anthropological research has shown that alcohol, along with the use of other psychoactive substances, tends not to have pernicious social and health outcomes due to the way they are intertwined into a cosmos (ordered totality), composed of ritual, myth and systems of reciprocal exchange, and overall worldview. The impersonal, universal, detached rules of both free market principle and the public health perspective threaten to subvert these by replacing internal with external constraints on behaviour. The matter is worse again though as free market thought and the public health perspective are caught in a schismogenic bind. Gregory Bateson (2000) introduced this concept to help account for feedback effects in relationships, where through imitation there is a mimetic escalation (as in an arms race), or conversely a stiffening rigidification into opposition and difference (as in spectatorship-exhibitionism). Economic liberalism and the public health perspective are caught within such a schismogenic bind as calls for deregulation result in more entrenched calls for control, and vice versa, meaning that subversion does not just come from one side but two, with increasing force. Every culture has a phenomenology or a theory of how to use psychoactive substances as an aspect of a holistic worldview, which composes the ‘internal constraints’ that order their use. These can be coherent and constructive, or their order and ordering effects can be subverted, often through altruistic motives through the introduction of external constraints (including external incitements), that disrupt the context that internal constraints refer to. For example, Singer (1986: 122)

The subversion of virtuous drinking  135 notes in reference to free market thinking that corporate strategy aims at the active undermining of worldviews: Worldview refers to the conception of reality developed within a particular society. Increasingly, corporate leaders eschew the concern with cultural variation inherent in this conception and instead embrace a view of the world in which diverse peoples, lands and societies are lumped together to form a global market, a set of raw materials and a multisectorial labour force…. As summed by one corporate spokesperson: ‘The world’s political structures are completely obsolete’ because they impede ‘the search for global optimization of resources’. Of course, it is not unusual to see alcohol as an inherently subversive substance in itself. In a sense, the idea of alcohol as subversive is strange as alcohol is central in particular to European culture. Europeans consume the most alcohol globally (Babor 2010), but more significantly, it is culturally resonant, through its place in the Eucharist as well as in Classical Greek philosophy in symposia, is one of the main symbols of the aristocratic good life and has been a defining feature of the European civilisational area (Sherratt 1995). Yet it is also stereotypically represented as something that undermines order, as defined by utilitarianism, as embedded in the public health perspective – as it is correlated with the raft of costs listed in the introduction, reducing the overall level of well-being (utility) in society, undermining the twin orders of physical health and national productivity. Alcohol can be seen as ‘subversive’ but, in a more benign way, as something that suspends the social order but through this refreshes it. Drawing on Victor Turner (1969) and his work on rites de passage, it is evident that the use of psychoactive substances is dramatic and a means of symbolically keying a periodic shift of society into liminality (or in more prosaic language, a ‘time out’) where the roles and hierarchies of the social structure are temporarily suspended, and people enter an in-between phase of reflection, creativity and less regulated action. Such a movement is frequently associated with the use of such substances (Gusfield 1987; Pedersen 1994; Heath 2000). To call this subversive though is not at all right as this is a ‘suspension’, not a ‘subversion’ of order, and is really a form of conservation, of reanimating the social structure (Turner 1969). Similarly, carnival is transgressive, involving a dissolution of the structures of everyday life, with a radical inversion of hierarchy but inherently conservative and protective of the political order (Bakhtin 1984). For Durkheim (1964), furthermore, deviance – such as periodic drunkenness and excess – is necessary to mark out what the norm is, making the subversive the functional. To see alcohol and other psychoactive substance use as subversive is a puritan position. Indeed the public health perspective, which frames alcohol as a dangerous substance, corrosive of health, is largely a product of Protestant and spirit drinking cultures. In Protestant societies particularly,

136  John O’Brien the framework of sociability linked with alcohol was disrupted, through the problematisation and suppression of festive culture and traditional forms of sociability, due to how these were not conducive to its culture of individualism, self-control and discipline (Butler et al. 2017: 20). In spirit drinking cultures the framework of sociability was depredated either through spirits becoming an early commodity of mass consumption on the free-market or through centralised alcohol monopolies run by the state, acting essentially as a drug dealer, with this serving as a key source of revenue. Thus, the puritan view of alcohol as subversive is a product of a context where sociability had been subverted and disrupted from the early modern period itself. Levine (1992) identified how action against alcohol is not directly linked to the objective extent of alcohol problems but substantially shaped by the presence of such a historical foundation. Furthermore, whether alcohol and other substance use is seen as subversive, undermining morality and health, is also associated with the question of whose liminality it is rather than objective impacts on health and society. In a stratified and pluralistic society, there is not a single tribe but many status groups, generations, subcultures and neotribes, with their own modes of alcohol consumption or taste in psychoactive substances, with contestation over the respectability, deviance and subversiveness of the drinking and drug habits of each (Heath 1995: 339, 350, 353). Moral panics and counter-­ moral panics – from higher to lower social groups, from the mass to the elite and from side to side – represent the habits of the other as a danger and decry the threat they pose to the moral order of society. This however is largely based on contests over social distinction and practices of symbolic violence, rather than actual dangers (Bourdieu 1984). We get closer to an adequate usage of the term ‘subversion’ in relation to alcohol and psychoactive substance use when we move away from what could be called the ‘normal subversion’ that animates and reanimates the moral order of society and approach the idea of ‘social pathology’ – a ­dynamic that undermines the conditions for health in society. Engels (1969), as we have seen previously, initiated this from a materialist perspective, by identifying capitalism as a subversive agent, that attacked and undermined the necessary framework for a healthy and decent life. His work has the advantage of not scapegoating alcohol as the source of social problems but rather identifying alcohol problems as an expression of a terribly damaged society that industrial capitalism is hollowing out. However, Engels’s ­targeting of the source of subversion was somewhat off, as while capitalist societies have produced negative outcomes related to alcohol and other substances, this problem is hardly limited to them, and indeed are considerably more severe in socialist states. Rather than a utopian socialist reality of course, a centralised bureaucratic state emerged in ‘actually existing socialist’ societies, funded to a significant extent (to the order of 10–12 per cent of total revenue), by a state monopoly on the production and sale of alcohol; a level around four times higher than in capitalist states (Singer 1986: 126),

The subversion of virtuous drinking  137 alongside policies resulting in the undermining of traditional local ways of life that had for generations produced benign forms of drinking. A more fundamental insight is offered by Singer through his engagement with anthropology that state formation, colonialism and the expansion of the ­capitalism-world system, as well as socialist empires, have driven the destruction of cultures and systematic undermining of worldviews, resulting in terrible outcomes from alcohol use. The real source of subversion is the ‘subversion of lifeworlds’, which can come from a variety of sources.

Health: uncovering It can be very difficult to help. Altruistic motives can be the most dangerous of all as the benign change that they seek to enact can result in actually sowing disorder. The dream of the Enlightenment is of producing a more perfect order, to elevate humanity, but it confronts the difficulty of the integrity of lifeworlds, which the ‘progress’ it sets in train may disrupt and fragment. There are dynamics that exist, that wreak disorder, that cause a situation that we would wish were otherwise if only we were capable of knowing this was possible but that are beyond understanding or articulation as ‘problems’ we face. At a point in time, the nature of these problems is uncovered, their dynamics explained, allowing intervention in them, leading to their amelioration. This is the heroic self-understanding of public health researchers, who are the descendants of John Snow who first diagnosed the causes of the cholera outbreaks that ravaged cities, and who hope to be able to reveal their own version of the Broadstreet Pump, diagnosing a hitherto hidden source of disease and pathology. Due to medicine and public health uncovering the causes of morbidity and mortality in this manner, there has been a dramatic improvement in health. It is the clearest support for the promise of modernity and reason. Following the Enlightenment, through improved knowledge, science and technology mortality began to decline as a result of advances in medicine and public health ideas, and the institutional capacity and political will to implement these through policy (Cutler et al. 2006: 116). There are enduring difficulties, however, but perhaps these are not something that is integral to modernity but something that can be resolved through further ‘progress’ (Cutler 2006: 97, 16–17). For example, inequality is a major contributor to deficits in health due to psychosocial stress related to low status and behaviours related to these – often closely tied up with harmful modes of alcohol or other psychoactive substance use (Marmot 1997; Cutler 2006: 114–115). In addition, there are delayed responses from those with lower education to new knowledge about health risks, resulting in widening health inequalities as new knowledge continues to be uncovered. Corroborating evidence for the role of higher status people incorporating new health knowledge into their habits can be seen in how before the Enlightenment there was not a health gradient between common people and

138  John O’Brien aristocrats in England and before the germ theory of disease there was no difference of rates of infant mortality between the children of physicians and other people (Cutler 2006: 117). These are two problems – status-related psychosocial problems and education – that can be addressed through the inherently modern ideal of equality. As the more fundamental contributors to increased morbidity and reduced mortality have been conquered, such as infectious diseases, attention has shifted more to lifestyle, and the chronic and acute conditions that are correlated with different behaviours, making alcohol an increasingly significant target of health policy (Babor 2010).

Health: undermining Health is in many senses objective, dealing with organisms, disease, the diagnosis and treatment of these, and because of this its study has increasingly separated out from religious and philosophical ideas and particular cultural understandings. Because of this it is something that progress can occur in, alongside the increase in reason and ‘Enlightenment’. However, health is also clearly a construction, which has no absolute measure, and is a product of experience and definitions, which are produced in a circle of recognition. ‘Progress’ is not really possible with this dimension of health, and in fact it could be argued that health is endangered by it, as is evident from the highly ambivalent impact of economic development and rising incomes on well-­being. The work of Durkheim (2002) on anomie is immediately relevant here, demonstrating how social change threatens the moral order of a community, fragments and disturbs ways of life, traditions and their ideals, resulting in anomie. Thus, health cannot simply be thought of in terms of ‘progress’ but also needs to be thought of in terms of ‘good order’. Good order could be said to consist of long-established relationships of trust and reciprocity, and of ritual life within a community, which are ultimately nested in an overall worldview. While new understandings can uncover, they can also undermine having a subversive effect. Foucault (1997) dealt with ‘problematisations’: the making of things, previously not considered problems, seen in habitual, taken-forgranted ways, into things that must come to be known, become objects of discourse, and be governed. While Foucault’s concern was largely sex, alcohol has been a major target of this practice too. The nature of the problematisation is shaped as much by the constellation of institutional forces that it is an accommodation of as by the adequacy of the knowledge this produces for understanding its object: ‘alcohol problems’ (Bacchi 2015). This is quite a different order of knowledge then, often quite lacking in adequacy for orienting people towards action problems (such as how to drink constructively), which frequently undermine that which is settled, rather than reveal what is hidden. A subversive effect of problematisations with regard to health is the undermining and overturning of lifeworlds that had underpinned health, and limited alcohol-related harms, through a taken-for-granted immersion

The subversion of virtuous drinking  139 of the activity in everyday life, the ritual order and the fabric of social relations. The duties, responsibilities, sociability, rites, obligations of exchange, expectations of its meaning and effects, ethical and aesthetic duties of how to use it that ordered alcohol consumption socially and habitually become undermined by a new type of order, composed of processes of subjectification and biopower. Thus, problematisation is linked with pathology as the practice of problematisation – of identifying alcohol problems – has had the effect of undermining and destroying acceptable and tolerable drinking cultures.

Cosmic order Worldviews that are intact can regulate consumption by providing a measure or, in other words, a model of what could be called ‘virtuous drinking’. This point is typically not grasped, however: for instance, in public health policy which is based on the mechanism of reducing access to alcohol and other psychoactive substances rather than having faith in character, a sense of proportion, or, in other words, internalised self-control and schemes of meaning as something that could lead to benign outcomes. Worldview, in the sense of the quality of ‘being’ – the intersubjective world composed of interpretations and definitions about the world learned within a culture – affects the effect of psychoactive substances. In clinical trials it is evident in placebo effects. The experience of intoxication has also been shown to be socially constructed, where people understand that consumption of alcohol denotes a context of a ‘time out’ and that their experience is shaped mostly by the ‘expectancy effect’ – the understanding from their culture of what effect the substance will elicit (McAndrew and ­Edgerton 1969). Thus, in experiments people will behave as though they have consumed moderate amounts of alcohol – despite the deception that they have in fact consumed none, though the deception breaks down at higher doses (Room 2001). Reactions to a psychoactive substance are profoundly shaped, not simply by its physiological effects but by ethical and aesthetic mental schemes of what the right way to consume a substance is, and how one should act following this. What does a worldview containing the concept of virtuous drinking look like? This was elaborated by Norman Zinberg (1984) through his concepts of drug, set and setting. ‘Drug’ is the spectrum of possible experience opened up by a particular substance that is an aspect of the material culture of a society. In no way does the matter stop here, and in fact this is least important for shaping experience. ‘Set’ refers to the mental frame of the user – the intention, expectation of the effect the substance will have, preparation of the substance and personality of the person using the psychoactive substance. ‘Setting’ refers to the context of use – the environment that the substance is being taken in, both immediate and the broader cultural and social context. The concept of ‘matrix’ can be added to ‘setting’ in order to add additional

140  John O’Brien nuance – meaning the immediate social system of family and peers, and living situation that use occurs within, which provides a context for the interpretation of and the frame for the experience – which can be judgemental, unsupportive, chaotic and contradictory or assist with the constructive integration of the experience (Eisner 1997). Virtually every user of a psychoactive substance, whether it is a cigarette, coffee, glass of wine or psychedelic, possesses a sense of proportion – in other words, a set of internal controls, knowing well and feeling strongly that there is a right place, a right time and right way to use as they have learned how to produce a safe and positive experience through modulating the elements of drug, set and setting appropriately. Indeed most use of substances is non-problematic and positive because most people have learned this successfully, with alcohol primarily used for the purpose of facilitating pleasurable sociability (Peele and Grant 1999) and substances such as psychedelics used in the pursuit of ‘peak experiences’ (Maslow 1964; Majić et al. 2015). However, when a worldview and its elements of drug, set and setting are undermined, rather than socially constructive (Douglas 1987) outcomes and psychologically integrative experiences, the outcome can be a chaotic hell for the user. Harm reduction shows new awareness of this dimension through the emergence of new versions of masters of ceremony in the guise of harm reduction workers – at music festivals, for instance, to assist with crisis episodes following the use of a psychoactive substance. This manifests itself as discomfort, confusion, fear and panic due to a loss of control and distress over experiences and symptoms that are unexpected and not understandable, linked with aversive outcomes of use. In sum a failure of interpretive frames and an inability to understand or predict and, therefore, control what is happening (Carmo Carvalho et al. 2014). The source of these outcomes are problems in the drug, set and setting figuration. With the drug aspect, there may be polydrug use, which results in unpredictable outcomes; inexperienced users can show poor judgement in the quantity consumed; illicit substances may be impure, adulterated and the potency is not known. With set, the person may suffer from mental health problems or may have experienced trauma or abuse, or negative life events, which may re-express themselves during psychoactive substance use. Finally, with setting the user may be surrounded by unfriendly, unsupportive, chaotic companions; may not have taken the substance intentionally; or may be in an aversive and unpleasant physical environment that is uncomfortable, without places to rest or withdraw, too hot or too cold, or loud, with a surfeit of visual stimulation, and with people engaging in disturbing behaviours in their vicinity (Carmo Carvalho 2014: 82–83). Crisis intervention attempts to turn an unpleasant experience through the use of psychoactive substances into a constructive one, by offering a safe and comfortable space of care, and empathetically facilitating the person to verbalise their difficulties, so that they can establish understanding of what is happening to them, and accept the process of their experience.

The subversion of virtuous drinking  141 Anthropological research has demonstrated this point. Hartogsohn (2017: 7) recounts the research of Anthony F.C. Wallace on peyote use: While white users of mescaline exhibited extreme mood swings, alternating between depression, anxiety, and euphoria, their native A ­ merican counterparts manifested a relative stability of mood, characterized by enthusiasm and religious awe. Whereas white mescaline users often forsake their social inhibitions, exhibiting sexual and/or aggressive behavior, participants in peyote ceremonies kept up their proper behavior. While white subjects displayed a host of psychiatric disorders such as suspiciousness bordering on paranoia, as well as ‘‘unwelcome feelings of loss of contact with reality, depersonalization, meaningless, ‘splitpersonality’ etc.’’… Indian peyotists displayed no such phenomena. Finally, while white subjects showed no therapeutic benefits or behavioral changes following their peyote experience, their Native American counterparts reported feelings of deep connection with a more meaningful, higher order of existence, which was supportive to their integration in the community. The difference was caused by set and setting – Native Americans had cognitive frames and behavioural scripts that allowed them to integrate their experiences into a meaningful message, rather than chaotic invasions, to control their experience, positive evaluation for undergoing such an experience in the broad context of their culture, and an experience that is not undergone under fear of potential punishment or threat to one’s social role. Crucially, it also occurs under guidance from masters of ceremony, rather than as individuals consuming an experience detached from a context ­(Hartogsohn 2017: 8). In literary Paris, in the circle around Charles Baudelaire in the Club des Hashischins, which was focussed on the psychoactive substance-assisted exploration of consciousness in the interests of fostering experiences that facilitated their artistic practice, the importance of set and setting was strongly articulated. They were aware of how the same dose can result in radically different outcomes due to differences in context (Hartogsohn 2017: 3). Baudelaire (2002: 4, 7) arrived at this through a phenomenology of intoxication, exploring the experience from the inside. He decried the ‘useless books’ by ‘Pharisaical pseudo-moralists’ that focus on wine as an object, with objective characteristics, with objective effects, demanding that its subjective experience is the true reality: of the context of aesthetic accompaniments that make it meaningful and pleasurable, of the need for a good moral life to be a good drinker, of the encounter with a substance as one with a ‘mysterious god’ that results in variable outcomes depending on what both parties bring to the meeting. Similarly with hashish, the stage of preparation, an appreciation for its aesthetics, following rules for appropriate and wise use, holding the correct expectations for its effect, which are developed through

142  John O’Brien learning through one’s companions; or in sum not being ‘ignorant or idiotic’ in its use (Baudelaire 2002). He (2002: 15) dreamt of a future research programme: ‘When there is a real philosophical doctor, something you hardly ever find, he will be able to carry out a penetrating study of wine, a sort of twofold psychology, the two terms of which are wine and man’. LSD research in the 1950s stands as a radical opposite to Baudelaire’s phenomenology. Through psychiatric researchers’ lack of understanding of set and setting, they engaged in a grand self-fulfilling prophecy as, to investigate LSD’s effect, they would suggest to patients that they would experience a period of mental illness under its effects in the setting of a hospital surrounded by detached scientists, separated from a social context to form their experiences in. Consequently the impact of the drug was typically negative in contrast to the growing communities centred around positive experiences of its use. Thus, through growing awareness of the critical importance of situational factors and cultural framing in shaping experiences and outcomes, Norman Zinberg (1984) would adopt the concepts that allowed him to understand one of the grandest natural experiments in drugs research: when soldiers who were supposedly addicted to opiates during their service in the Vietnam without treatment ceased their drug use when they returned to their native society due to the change in set and setting that this entailed (Hartogsohn 2017). The experimental and phenomenological observations mentioned demonstrate the importance of set and setting. This leads us to the point of the role of civilisation in producing benign patterns of usage of psychoactive substances through the meaning that is attached to use within a worldview. Civilisation is the ultimate aspect of ‘setting’. It may establish frames defining the meaning of use that are Apollonian or Dionysian; but whatever the frame is, it will be of decisive importance, alongside the potency and availability of substances. Even more important than the frame being positive or negative is the point that there must be one that is not subverted and broken apart, to not leave people in a situation of chaos, unable to interpret or control what they are undergoing.

Chaotic order Hartogsohn (2017) notes that the importance of the concepts of drug, set and setting has not been sufficiently recognised. This is largely due to modern ways of thinking, which makes these concepts very difficult to appreciate. Classical ethics was based on an idea of self-love, where action is based on the motive to aim at eudaimonia, the highest good, which is happiness and goodness simultaneously, and thus beneficial to all (Aristotle 1953). Such a way of thinking can very easily allow one to appreciate the ethical centrality of a sense of proportion and internal controls in ethical action. A contrasting way of thinking is to see moral action as impersonal, based on the establishment of general rules and the taking of detached positions, in

The subversion of virtuous drinking  143 order to avoid bias and to maximise the good for all humanity or even beings in general, following Kantian and utilitarian thought. Consequently, moral action is not based on the inclination to pursue the ‘good’, based on feeling or habit, which feels sensuously right, reasonable and proportionate, in the manner in which it has been defined in a circle of recognition in a culture, so that the act results in one’s pleasure as well as goodness. Rather, moral action is based on duty: the automatic following of a rule that should be impersonally applied, in order to ‘altruistically’ contribute to the maximal happiness of all. This requires peoples to imaginatively become detached spectators of the world and not be participating inhabitants of a common-sense lifeworld (Nagle 1986). This form of thought subverts worldviews. Common sense is based on ‘non-rationalist’ elements, such as taboo, taste or a sense of proportion and what is in due measure, symbolic markers of tribal affiliation and hierarchy, which can be readily dissolved by ‘rationalist’ scrutiny, because they do not have a logical basis, rather a practical social basis (Graham et al. 2009). There are things that are culturally defined as being simply not on, forbidden, out of place: definitions that can hardly be described as ‘rational’. Yet they have effects in producing more or less adequate means of orientation in the world. Rather than thinking of bodies as entities, varying on the basis of exposures and vulnerabilities to a variable (e.g. alcohol), this type of thinking deals with when, where, how and with whom one can and should drink or use psychoactive substances and, equally, what is ignorant, foolish and idiotic. It is a worldview, based on a concept of virtue – ‘good drinking’. Europe, in terms of drinking cultures, could be divided into two moral worlds. To make a grand generalisation – the Mediterranean tradition is a eudaimonian moral world of drinking, where a social form exists. Unlike Plato’s forms (or perhaps like them), these exist through a process of social recognition. They are a model of the good that exists, yet cannot quite be articulated, which nonetheless are known through dispositions, and which are pursued through rationality, not in a logical intellectual sense but through acquiring a sense of proportion. And through their realisation personal happiness is achieved as well as goodness. Examples of these are Jewish and Mediterranean forms of drinking. Jewish people who conform to their religion universally consume alcohol yet lack significant difficulties in comparison with other groups (Gefou-Madianou 1992: 6), reflected in the Yiddish saying: ‘“Schikker ist ein Goy” (to be drunk is a gentile thing)’ (Heath 2000: 90). Similarly, Mediterranean societies, despite their very high level of alcohol consumption, traditionally have lower levels of social problems associated with alcohol (Babor 2010), due to how alcohol is interwoven into the ‘matrix of the personal, social, and religious lives of the people of these societies’ (Gefou-Madianou 1992: 22). Contemporary drinkers in Mediterranean societies, despite the fragmentation of traditional frameworks of drinking, and their influence by the Northern European drinking norms, continue to carry the legacy of the sense of proportion developed in their society, and

144  John O’Brien not engage in extreme intoxication in the same manner as in Anglo-­Saxon and Scandinavian society (Beccaria and Sande 2003). A similar eudaimonian moral world of drinking has been identified by anthropologists in their research on small-scale societies. The typical story of this research is that they arrived in some community to study some other topic but increasingly became attuned to something that struck them as remarkable: the apparent absence of problems associated with alcohol due to the way that it was tightly embedded in a cosmic order of the systems of reciprocal gift-­exchange, the sacred, myth and ritual, which bind chaotic potentials and produce constructive outcomes (see Heath (1958) for a classic example of this and Room (1984) for an interrogation of the claims made in this literature). The second moral world is more representative of Northern Europe, ordered by impersonal detached rule-based reasoning, seeking to regulate drinking culture through rationally designed systems. The aim is not for the self to experience pleasure and fulfil itself but rather to help humanity, reducing the self and its needs to insignificance, with a true moral view being a ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagle 1986). It is in this second moral world that the public health perspective has its intellectual roots, and it is argued in the following section that its effect is to subvert the first eudaimonian moral world. A concrete historical example of this is the Bratt System, instituted in ­Sweden between 1914 and 1955, which rationed alcohol through the requirement for a ration book for the purchase of all alcohol. The quantity allowed varied on the basis of variables that were considered to amount to additional vulnerabilities for the individual consumer and risks that their drinking posed, such as financial, marital and social status, sex, age, residence and past incidents of antisocial behaviour or crime (Bancroft 2009: 129). As an aside, the consumption obverse to the question of regulation in this moral world is the nightmare vision of drugs under the rule of a Kantian, utilitarian universe, in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, where psychoactive substance use is disconnected from context entirely, and reduced to individualistic hedonistic medication in the shape of soma holidays. Interestingly the core principles of the Harm Reduction Model contradict modern ethics. These are ­‘pragmatism, humanism and proximity’ (Carmo Carvalho et al. 2014: 84). Rather than impersonal, universal rules, it focusses on the immediate context of lived experience, and moral action in a specific, concrete context.

Subversive states The state formation process, which, according to Elias (2000), accompanied the civilising process, is closely tied up with alcohol and other psychoactive substances as these have been critical sources of revenue to finance the machinery of states, standing at 0.5-3 per cent for European Union states today (Anderson and Baumberg 2006: 54), with related activities such as night-time economies contributing around 3 per cent of GDP (Hayward and Hobbs 2007). Prior to the early 20th century, which is a tipping point in the

The subversion of virtuous drinking  145 history of taxation, where states became able to levy far more sophisticated forms of tax, and prior to growing diversity and complexity of economies, states were far more dependent on alcohol-related taxes. For example in the UK alcohol contributed 40 per cent of total revenue over the 19th century (Harrison 1971), falling from 35 per cent in 1900, to 28 per cent in 1910, to 12 per cent in 1940, to 7 per cent in 1967 and to 3 per cent in 1987 (Gerritsen 2000: 106). States are the ultimate source of universal, detached rules as opposed to the local, context bound morality of eudaimonian ethics. The problems with the state as the basis of and enforcer of this system of rules is its tendency to corruption, and one of the surest temptation leading to corruption over the history of state formation has been the allure of increasing tax revenue through pushing the spread and increase in use of alcohol and other substances. Thus, the civilising process is mirrored with a decivilising process as the lifeworlds (which are the ultimate source of civility) that contain alcohol and substance use are subverted through the drive for revenue. This has the form of an ongoing cycle of promotion of use, regulation, to deregulation, to reregulation, to re-deregulation, to prohibition, to liberalisation and on and on in an absurd comic tale, in what is a good example for the ‘perverted linear transformation process’ (see Chapter 1). Through all of this a sense of proportion is lost due to a continual disruption of the figuration of drug, set and setting, with the state sponsored Gin Epidemic of the 18th century, and global promotion of opiate use as classic examples of this, and historical lessons that have not been learned (Nicholls 2009). The problem is even deeper, however, because as questions of biopower, of maximising the health and productivity of the population, rise in influence alongside the question of revenue maximisation, public policy comes to be shaped by contradictory imperatives of deregulation and the restriction of supply as liberalism and public health stand in antagonism to one another. These have a schismogenic relationship with each other that escalates and rigidifies their different positions. Thus, the state becomes a source of subversion as it becomes the expression of a contradiction. Unlike the Gramscian model of hegemony, where the interests and outlook of a class succeed in becoming legitimated, it may be more plausible to see the outcome as being a pathology of chronic complexification, involving a process of intensification of the difference between different interests and positions, resulting in a deepening schism in culture. This expresses itself in the shape of a society that is blocked – unable to take action while also suffering from intensification as there is a mimetic escalation between different positions. No side has decisive power over the other, each checking the influence of the other and potentially creating an unhappy ossified but escalating arrangement. This is evident in alcohol policy which is typically contradictory, with different arms of government captured by different interests, and often working against one another. On behalf of the government it results in departmentalism as government departments act at cross purposes, promoting, regulating and restricting alcohol use all at the same time (Butler 2002).

146  John O’Brien

Conclusion Laissez-faire thought, exemplified in relation to alcohol in Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, written in the context of the Gin Epidemic, argued that private vices can contribute to public prosperity, and so regulating consumption of psychoactive substances or conceiving of their use in terms of virtue was erroneous. Instead, the universal, detached position of free market principles, acting as an external constraint (or incitement) on behaviour, was predicted to produce the greatest good for the greatest many. M ­ andeville’s theory, scandalous at the time, has risen to orthodoxy today, with the overall trend in policy towards neoliberalism in the European Union. Its presuppositions are a conviction in market rationality, while accepting that consumers are not always rational, though they can be nudged, and where this fails, coercive measures are acceptable, though will only be aimed at the individual rather than the system, exemplified in the industry propagated maxim to ‘drink responsibly’ (Butler et al. 2017: 22–23). The public health perspective takes the entirely opposite view. Their goal is the introduction of regulatory control measures, based on limiting availability, controlling price and regulating marketing, that will apply across the entire population in order to maximise health. Unlike the neoliberal view of the market as a benign automatic system, it sees it as, to an extent, dysfunctional. Thus, the state has a duty at times to act against the market, taking on the responsibility of ‘stewardship’, not simply acting as a ‘night watchman’. Thus, against a ‘negative conception of liberty’, seeking to protect personal liberty, for example to drink and smoke as one wishes, the public health perspective advocates a ‘positive conception of liberty’, where it restricts freedoms in order to ultimately create greater freedoms (Butler et al. 2017: 10–11). The trap is that each side represents a problem for the other entrenching their positions, and stimulating their defensive and offensive manoeuvres all the more. The public health perspective focusses on transforming the institutional framework that shapes drinking culture, by shifting norms, regulating production, sale and promotion, and capturing the policy agenda of government (Butler et al. 2017: 6, 8). Similarly the alcohol industry and its neoliberal agenda have a concrete interest in deregulation, and enshrining international trade agreements that will protect this. While the neoliberal alcohol-­industry project articulates a model of humans as autonomous, the public health perspective defines people as fundamentally open to external influence and interdependent, with everyone’s manner of drinking in some way affecting all others (Skog 1985). Thus, the liberal alcohol industry sees the concept of virtue as nonsense on stilts, while there is a lack of faith in personality structure, or a cultural model of virtuous drinking in limiting problems in the public health perspective, instead favouring supply-side strategies. The worry with regard to the public health perspective is that while it may reduce overall consumption, it can have a subversive effect on the worldview that drinking occasions are nested in as reducing the legitimacy of

The subversion of virtuous drinking  147 consumption can increase the pleasure of consumption through rendering it a transgressive act against powerful ‘big others’. Rather than ‘virtuous drinking’, the result can be ‘revolting drinking’, which is both deliberately oppositional to mainstream society and disgusting because of how the coherence of the figuration of drug, set and setting is undermined by the negative setting that has been created to frame its use.

Bibliography Anderson, Peter and Baumberg, Ben (2006) Alcohol in Europe, London: Institute of Alcohol Studies. Aristotle (1953) Ethics, London: Penguin. Babor, Thomas (2010) Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity: Research and Policy, ­Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bacchi, Carol (2015) ‘Problematizations in Alcohol Policy: WHO’s “Alcohol Problems”’, Contemporary Drug Problems 42, 2: 130–147. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bancroft, Angus (2009) Drugs Intoxication and Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bateson, Gregory (2000) ‘Double Bind’, in M. C. Bateson (ed.) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baudelaire, Charles (2002) [1851] On Wine and Hashish, London: Hesperus. Beccaria, Franca and Sande, Allan (2003) ‘Drinking Games and Rite of Life ­Projects: A Social Comparison of the Meaning and Functions of Young People’s Use of Alcohol During the Rite of Passage to Adulthood in Italy and Norway’, Young 11, 2: 99–119. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Shane (2002) Alcohol, Drugs and Health Promotion in Modern Ireland, ­Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Butler, Shane, Elmeland, Karen, Nicholls, James, and Thom, Betsy (2017) Alcohol, Power and Public Health, London: Routledge. Carmo Carvalho, Maria, de Sousa, Mariana Pinto, Frango, Paula, Dias, P ­ edro, Carvalho, Joana, Rodrigues, Marta, and Rodrigues, Tânia (2014) ‘Crisis ­Intervention Related to the Use of Psychoactive Substances in Recreational ­Settings-Evaluating the Kosmicare Project at Boom Festival’, Current Drug Abuse Reviews 7, 2: 81–100. Cutler, David, Deaton, Angus, and Lleras-Muney, Adriana (2006) ‘The Determinants of Mortality’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, 3: 97–120. Douglas, Mary (1987) Constructive Drinking, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, Emile (1964) The Rules of the Sociological Method, New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile (2002) [1897] Suicide, London: Routledge. Eisner, Betty Grover (1997) ‘Set, Setting, and Matrix’, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 29, 2: 213–216. Elias, Norbert (2000) [1939] The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell. Engels, Friedrich (1969) [1845] Conditions of the Working Class in England, London: Panther.

148  John O’Brien Foucault, Michel (1997) The Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, New York: The New Press. Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra (1992) Alcohol, Gender and Culture, London: Routledge. Gerritsen, Jan-Willem (2000) The Control of Fuddle and Flash, Boston, MA: Brill. Graham, Jesse, Haidt, Joseph, and Nosek, Brian (2009) ‘Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96, 5: 1029–1046. Gusfield, Joseph (1987) ‘Passages to Play: Rituals of Drinking Time in American Society’, in M. Douglas (ed) Constructive Drinking, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamlin, Christopher (1995) ‘Public Health Then and Now: Could You Starve to Death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr Controversy and the Loss of the “Social” in Public Health’, American Journal of Public Health 85, 6: 856–866. Harrison, Brian (1971) Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in ­E ngland: 1815–72, Keele: Keele University Press. Hartogsohn, Ido (2017) ‘Constructing Drug Effects: A History of Set and Setting’, Drug Science, Policy and Law 3: 1–17. Hayward, Keith and Hobbs, Dick (2007) ‘Beyond the Binge in “Booze Britain”: Market-Led Liminalization and the Spectacle of Binge Drinking’, The British Journal of Sociology 58, 3: 437–456. Heath, Dwight B. (1958) ‘Drinking Patterns of the Bolivian Camba’, Quarterly ­Journal of Studies on Alcohol 19, 3: 491–508. Heath, Dwight B. (1995) ‘An Anthropological View of Alcohol and Culture in International Perspective’, in D.B. Heath (ed) International Handbook on Alcohol and Culture, London: Greenwood Press. Heath, Dwight B. (2000) Drinking Occasions, Philadelphia, PA: Brunner/Mazel. Levine, Harry G. (1992) ‘Temperance Cultures’, in M. Lader, G. Edwards and C. Drummond (eds) The Nature of Alcohol and Drug Related Problems, Oxford: ­Oxford University Press. Majić, Tomislav, Schmidt, Timo T., and Gallinat, Jürgen (2015) ‘Peak Experiences and the Afterglow Phenomenon: When and How Do Therapeutic Effects of ­Hallucinogens Depend on Psychedelic Experiences?’, Journal of Psychopharmacology 29, 3: 241–253. Marmot, Michael (1997) ‘Inequality, Deprivation and Alcohol Use’, Addiction 92, 3s1: 13–20. Maslow, Abraham H. (1964) Religion, Values and Peak Experiences, New York: Viking. McAndrew, Craig and Edgerton, Robert B. (1969) Drunken Comportment, Chicago, IL: Aldine. McMichael, Anthony J. (1999) ‘Prisoners of the Proximate: Loosening the ­Constraints on Epidemiology in an Age of Change’, American Journal of Epidemiology 149, 10: 887–897. Nagle, Thomas (1986) The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicholls, James (2009) The Politics of Alcohol, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pedersen, Willy (1994) ‘Rites of Passage in High Modernity’, Young 2, 1: 21–32. Peele, Stanton and Grant, Marcus (1999) Alcohol and Pleasure: A Health Perspective, Philadelphia, PA: Brunner/Mazel.

The subversion of virtuous drinking  149 Room, Robin (1984) ‘Alcohol and Ethnography: A Case of Problem Deflation?’, Current Anthropology 25, 169–178. Room, Robin (2001) ‘Intoxication and Bad Behaviour: Understanding Cultural ­Differences in the Link’, Social Science and Medicine 53: 189–198. Sherratt, Andrew (1995) ‘Alcohol and Its Alternatives: Symbolism and Substance in Pre-industrial Cultures’, in J. Goodman, P.E. Lovejoy and A. Sherratt (eds) ­Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, London: Routledge. Singer, Merrill (1986) ‘Toward a Political Economy of Alcoholism: The Missing Link in the Anthropology of Drinking’, Social Science and Medicine 23, 2: 113–130. Skog, Ole-Jorgen (1985) ‘The Collectivity of Drinking Cultures: A Theory of the Distribution of Alcohol Consumption’, British Journal of Addiction 80: 83–99. Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure, New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Zinberg, Norman E. (1984) Drug, Set, and Setting: The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

8 Mammon and the subversion of values A theological analysis Paul Tyson

In this chapter I am going to put forward a Platonist theological account of Mammon. Mammon is here understood as the religious dynamic intrinsic to the collective enterprise of pursuing the acquisition of money as a valuable end in its own right. In this chapter Mammon is not considered as a private vice but rather as the doxological principle which is at the core of the cultural unity of globalizing secular technological modernity. Here, the citadels of Mammon are the financial centres of the prevailing post-war economic world order – the Old City of London, Wall Street, Luxembourg, etc.1 The theologians of Mammon are our economists. The religious institutions of Mammon are our international financial institutions.2 The aristocracy of Mammon – on whom we all depend for the continuity of our lifeworld – is the Davos class.3 And, of course, our lifeworld4 is set up to preserve and perpetuate the order of Mammon.5 First I will briefly unpack this phrase ‘a Platonist theological account’. Then I will outline a Platonist theological account of Mammon. I will conclude by arguing that Mammon – as the false divinization norm governing our global dynamics of finance and power – subverts real value and requires some form of theologically informed counteraction if its destructive tendencies are to be addressed at its root.

A Platonist theological account This chapter will not attempt to provide a scholarly explication of what ­‘Platonist theology’ is, and what varieties of it there are.6 Here I will only sketch the barest taxonomy of this family of now exotic conceptual animals. The key identifying ideas here are ‘metaxu’ and ‘divinity’. A Platonist understanding of the nature of perceived reality is metaxological. The Greek word metaxu means ‘between’.7 To the Platonist the pure immanence of modern empiricism and the pure transcendence of modern rationalism, and the ‘proof’ discourse of their pragmatic combination in the mathematico-experimental methodology of modern science, are impossible. On the contrary, our embodied existence is situated between the flux and contingency of the perceived spatiotemporal manifold and the essential

Mammon and the subversion of values  151 intellective universalism of unchanging eternity. To Plato, no experience of immanence is pure; all immanence is haunted by transcendence. Equally, to Plato, no conceptual insight or logical necessity is not embedded in the flux and contingency of our spatiotemporal existence.8 From within our normal experience of the world, contingent immanence and essential transcendence are always mixed. This is why opinion, paradox, analogy, liminality, indeterminacy and an astonishingly dynamic interplay between social reality and collective poetic imagination characterize our understanding of the world.9 To Plato, the inherent impossibility of any purely immanent or purely transcendent understanding of the world neither negates transcendent truth nor overcomes the contingency and indeterminacy of our experiential contexts.10 A Platonist understanding of the nature of reality is theological. That is, the ‘goodness beyond being’ – the fount of all being and all truth – is divine (Plato, Republic, 508a–509b). Such an ‘enchanted’ understanding of the source of reality and of the intellectively derived nature of material ­existence (i.e. tangible reality is not its own source but comes from the Mind of God) sits in sharp contrast with modern materialist realism, which is reductive, mechanical, corpuscular11 and, most importantly, progressive. In other words, it is mainstream within modernity to think of the higher as emerging from the lower, of mind emerging from corpuscular matter and of the measurable and locatable alone as real though always undergoing (advancing) change. Change is here inherently unsettling, inevitable and for the better. To our modern metaphysical assumptions, only material bodies in motion are real, rendering thought, quality, essence, meaning, purpose, mind, beauty, goodness, etc. artificial constructs derived from meaningless, ­quality-free and quantifiably objective, mere materiality. In sharp contrast, Platonist thinking – in common with the main streams of Classical and Medieval metaphysics – did not think the higher could emerge from the lower.12 To speak of Platonism as theological simply implies that qualities, minds, meanings and purposes are taken as real and ‘primitive’, such that the higher (intellective, eternal) is more basic than lower (material, contingent) rather than the reverse. Here divine essential (and unchanging) reality is ontologically prior to the realm of contingent and ever changing material existence. This in no way negates a metaxological understanding of how we experience reality, for there is a dialectic relationship between essence and existence that cannot be reduced to any ‘pure’ conception of either. I will now use the categories of Platonist theology to relate an analysis of money to Christian theology (which, in its orthodox forms, is indeed Platonist as regards metaxu and divinity) for the ever creative fusion of the transcendent with the immanent, the timeless with the historical, cannot avoid being situated in some context of substantive existential commitment. It is recognizably Christian conceptions of false divinization in relation to money (‘Mammon’) that I will here draw on as a Platonist theologian.13

152  Paul Tyson

A Theological account of Mammon To the Platonist, nothing is ever simply a material object. To the Christian Aristotelian Platonist,14 every being has an essence, a purpose, an inherent meaning, a place in the order of the cosmos and an intrinsic value as a participant in the wonder of being. To this outlook the wealth, harmonious abundance and value in nature and culture are not human creations but are gifts from the Ground of Being (God) to existence (the created cosmos), however much they must be shaped, interpreted and reformed by human action and imagination. Real essential value is never humanly produced and owned, but it is always – fundamentally – divinely given. On the other hand, poverty, competitive scarcity, debt slavery and price are largely human inventions that have no inherent relationship to essential meaning. Indeed, ‘ownership’, inferring exclusive use and an absolute right of acquisition and disposal, is a socially constructed fiction. Money as a means of securing ownership and asserting a right to exclusive use is a social fiction built on a social fiction. Money used simply to make money and advance financial power is – to the Aristotelian – an unnatural and immoral perversion of a fiction built on a fiction.15 Money has no ontic reality in itself but is only of genuine use value when it is subservient to real values, genuine wealth, valid purposes and needful or meaningful activities. For these reasons Plato and Aristotle never quite take the construction, manufacture and acquisition of money seriously. Money is but the derivative means of the game of commercial activity – itself a derivative activity by any (Aristotelian) right thinking evaluation. As such, the in/justice and dis/value of the game are not found within the game but in why and how people play the game, and in what the game ends up doing to real people, real value and real nature. Basically, where there is a conception of value as transcending mere materiality, mere instrumentality and mere social convention, then the realm of monetary power is more naturally kept in check to the realm of real value. Where there is no such conception, money becomes a value – and, ­inexorably, the ultimate value16 – in its own right. When this happens, the locus of meaning is practically transferred from the divine (the source of all real value) to the human, and money itself gains a functional (yet false) ontology as an object of real value. Due to the seductive promise of unlimited accumulative and manipulative power that the abstraction, money, facilitates, this shift to the high valuation of a human construct is inevitably doxologically charged. At this point you get the religious construction of what the Christian scriptures call ‘Mammon’; the pursuit of monetary gain taking on the role of the first object of worship. This is no religiously or morally neutral dynamic. Mammon is the displacement of true worship through failing to adhere to a right evaluation of the divine source of value and failing to recognize human accountability to the divine in our pursuit of true value. This anthropo-divinizing monetary practice has, at its core, a spiritual dynamic. Mammon also facilitates the loss of true value in moral

Mammon and the subversion of values  153 dealings. The Christian scriptures warn that ‘the love of money is the root of all evils’ (1 Timothy 6:10) for Mammon is the root of the perversion of all values (the reduction of real value to exchange value)17 and the means by which a great many social evils are advanced. Interestingly, the demise of the Aristotelian view of purpose and value in nature in the 17th century lends itself to the rise of the great age of ­Mammon, for the modern conception of money is intimately bonded to modern metaphysics. It is no coincidence that the 17th century, the century in which the Aristotelian metaphysics of substances was replaced by the corpuscular metaphysics of bodies in motion, was also the century in which modern credit was created.18 The outgoing tide of the old way of thinking about ­reality – substances, essences, accidents, qualities, just price – is displaced by the incoming tide of an abstract and instrumental determinist ­mechanics, bearing market value and modern finance on its waters. In metaphysics after Descartes and Newton, the reality of the objective world is abstractly reduced to mechanical material relations which can be mathematically modelled in order to facilitate manipulative power. Descartes’s famous conception of animals as machines was expanded in the deism of this era where the cosmos itself was seen as a machine. Modern science simply discovers the levers of the nature machine, due to our privileged position as machines (material bodies) with immaterial souls, which then enables us to rule over nature (now discretely separated off from supernature)19 as our biblical mandate requires. Francis Bacon saw science as the process whereby we hound, interrogate and penetrate all nature’s fecund secrets, so as to bend her nature to man’s needs and desires.20 Carolyn ­Merchant writes of this tendency in Western modernity for our science to be a rapine masculine instrumental power wielded in dominion over a feminine and unreasoning nature. In broad terms the 17th and 18th centuries are a stunning departure from an integrative understanding of humanity and nature which was the Catholic/pagan synthesis of medieval metaphysics, theology and customary practice to produce a nature that we stand over and control with our reason and experimental interrogations. Of course mercantile opportunism well predates the scientific revolution, as does the ‘divine mandate to rule’ seen in the bulls of donation justifying the rampant violent conquest of the New World by ‘Christendom’. But the loss of a metaphysics of substance renders the medieval economics of just price incomprehensible in the modern era and facilitates the rise of modern credit-based finance.21 By the end of the 17th century the real is no longer the Aristotelian realm of substantial beings living in complex interdependent natural relations but becomes a system of Cartesian grids and Newtonian mechanics to be manipulated via abstract, calculative, instrumental thinking. A strong current of 17th century English Protestant aristocratic disdain for Aristotelian philosophy, combined with their interest in the practical uses and military powers of new technologies, had much to do with the birth of the Royal Society in 1660. A new abstract mathematical instrumentalism was being liberated

154  Paul Tyson from pre-17th century philosophical restraint. By the 1690s the context is now right for the rise of the Bank of England in order to fund King William of Orange’s religious wars against the French Catholics, by credit. The creation of the entire system of modern finance out of credit – out of the promise of repayment, rather than out of any real thing – is a remarkable feat of abstract instrumentalism. There is a basic disconnect between the ordinary reality of real human lives, real natural things, and the human dynamics of real trade and production, and the abstract world of finance. Finance leans naturally towards the subversion of ordinary reality. First numbers in a ledger, and then magnetic symbols in a computer, are now power over real bodies, real people and real natural resources. To think of reality as not what it appears to be but as really being corpuscles in mechanical relations of force and motion, this liberates the imagination from immediate experience and facilitates an abstract system of manipulative power the likes of which we have not previously known. An ironic function of the very de-divinization of the larger created cosmos is that we now live in the high age of entirely non-divine symbolic incantations and their powerful enchantments: ours is the great – all be it secular – age of magic. A Platonist critique of post-17th century Western modernity focusses on the subversion of the real value, meaning and substantial reality of our ­actual experience of beings in the world by the abstract instrumentalism of approaching the world through the lens of mere physical mechanics and numerical cyphers.22 Mammon also escapes from substantive real value in this context and is liberated in ways never seen before by the newly abstract conceptions of modern financialized power. And yet modernity has indeed given us remarkable advancements in the knowledge of how nature works, has given us genuine powers over some of its real perils to human life and happiness, and modern finance need not be inherently idolatrous and immoral. The modern production of credit is a collectively situated activity which manufactures the social realities of exchange value, the meaning of work and consumption, and market and political power, out of the range of ­possibility thresholds that the abstract instrumental mathematical thinking our modern metaphysics facilitates. These value and meaning generating thresholds are liminal spaces, imaginative and creative opportunities, opened up between the polarities we set up when delineating the material from the intellectual, the natural from the supernatural, power from value, work from leisure, sense from meaning, art from science and individuals from communities. The wondrous abstract demarcations that define secular modernity allow a creative (if dishonest) liberation from the world of reality in which facts and values are – as they actually are – always mixed.23 Even so, the invention of credit can be a wondrous good. Liminality opens up fabulous opportunities for human ingenuity and creativity. When the creative possibilities of money are used in good faith towards the ‘real value’24 of people and tradable things and services, financialized economies facilitate the development of complex community stratifications that flourish in a

Mammon and the subversion of values  155 vast diversity of specialized activities. There is no intrinsic reason why this sort of creative plurality cannot coexist with a communal doxological core centred on the summum bonum. In other words, poetic human harmonies constructed around the Reality of the Divine Good, as expressed (partially and by participation) in people and nature, is what good faith aims at. Indeed, no human community can function without some measure of good faith. Functional collective relationships and sustainable relationships between humanity, nature and divinity are the foundations upon which any financialized economy, in the final analysis, is actually built. But worship as a communal sociological reality – the doxological core of any common way of life – this is the key concept missing from a modern understanding of economics, finance and ethics. At this point we need to look more closely at the Christian understanding of Mammon (Ellul 1986; Brueggemann 2016; Welby 2016). The word ­‘mammon’ appears at the end of a passage in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6: 19–24) wherein Jesus of Nazareth explains that as doxological beings there can only be one unifying vision, one final centre of devotion, in everyone’s life.25 That centre is only secondarily ‘doctrinal’, but it is primarily action orienting, meaning giving and value defining. The pursuit of wealth as a unifying vision and practical centre of meaning and value is Mammon, and the life lived in the service of Mammon is incompatible with the true worship of God (understood equally as a life practice, and a way of seeing and pursuing value and meaning in the world). As Mammon is here understood as the shadow and perversion of right worship, the Christian vision of right worship needs to be grasped first. In late Classical Neoplatonist traditions, The Good is partially expressed, by participation, in all of creation, but The Good itself transcends creation. God is The Goodness Beyond Being, the grounds of all that is, and in Christian Platonist theology, the Creator. The transcendent nature of Divine Goodness is never fully realized within immanent creation, for it is the grounds of creation. In relation to human attempts to creatively order our world in right piety towards The Good, history shows that we never realize The Good but also that civilizations can take a great deal of structural falling short of The Good (sin), and even of evil, before they finally break down. This is testimony to the reality and primacy of Goodness, and against the reality of evil. For evil – thinking in Augustinian terms – is a privation, a falling short, a perversion of The Good (which is the ultimate Reality) rather than any substantial reality of its own nature, and is unviable for the construction of any enduringly real socially or materially sustainable arrangement. Sustainability is impossible without goodness. On the one hand, evil is privation; on the other hand we can never realize The Good fully. Noticeable here is the curious situation where the creative possibilities of partially realizing the summum bonum within the metaxological liminality of existence and the equally creative poesis of the non-reality of evil are both relations between indeterminate creative potential (freedom)

156  Paul Tyson and concrete temporal determinacy (necessity). Here one relationship spirals into the void and away from reality, where the other relationship constructs analogies of divine truth within the metaxological context of existence and gains a partial participation in The Good (which is also The Real). One relationship is a theosis transforming the human realm into a partial realization of the living image of God; the other is an idolatry of self-worship and false divinization, the vain attempt to raise the human above the divine and construct good and evil, power and justice, ex nihilo, as if we are the ultimate creator of reality ourselves. But these two processes typically exist dialectically, even paradoxically, together – this is the human experience of existence. As part of that experience we participate in the inevitable process of falling short of The Good. In sin we find that real value, real meaning and real power – indeed reality itself – is displaced. But this is complex, for all values, meanings and powers are not simply real or fantastic but are infused with imagination, collective belief and shared ways of living. Distinguishing between an imaginative creative dynamic of value/meaning/power that has an orientation towards reality, and those that have an orientation away from reality is never a clear-cut matter. In other words, ‘the void’ of human meaning construction is never simply empty; rather, it is liminal, a creative threshold situated between nothing and something, between fantasy and reality, between the true something of The Good and the final nothing of evil.

How viable is a Platonist theological account of Mammon? Since the 1840s mainstream social scientific thinking (which starts in earnest with Marx) has approached economics, politics, the study of cultural meanings and the nature of the human self, from within a pragmatic and materialist set of methodological and hermeneutic premises. So, with Marx and Durkheim, we might be happy to see religious dynamics operating within the doxological core of the collective construction of the consumer society lifeworld, but we interpret the meaning of religion itself within materialism. Curiously, the idea that there may be non-material realities is theoretically open – as metaphysical agnosticism towards all potential realities outside of the purview of modern science is a significant feature of the secular demarcation between inner conviction/interpretation and outward material facts – but methodologically, our objective knowledge discourse is atheistic. There are two significant problems with this stance. First, ethics itself – and hence the ethical viability of progressive political economic aims in both Marxism and Neoliberalism – becomes meaningless. Second, thought and meaning, and hence the meaning of the materialist rejection of divinity, becomes meaningless. For these reasons it strikes me that Platonist theology is far more intellectually viable than a materialist conception of worship. Ethics becomes meaningless to the methodological atheism of the modern social sciences because – in keeping with the metaphysical outlook of modern materialism – there is no real value to anything. This does not, of

Mammon and the subversion of values  157 course, preclude people from having ethical beliefs, acting ethically, or from societies upholding behavioural and legal norms designated as ethical, and these norms may be useful and even explicable in biological and evolutionary terms. However, this outlook holds that ‘value’ is an imaginative cultural invention as reality itself has no qualitative nature. This is the case because to modern metaphysics, natural reality – the only reality our knowledge of the real world can know – only has a quantitative and mechanical nature. If this is so then the violent scapegoating values embedded in fascism or the callous predatory values of free market individualism are not in reality better or worse than the egalitarian values of communitarian Marxism or the empathetic sensibilities of tolerant humanists. Values as means to certain ends (and here again we come up against the inescapable need for purpose orienting final objects of collective worship) are here mere instruments of certain types of practical material arrangements, and nothing genuinely valuable. So the disdain with which Marx describes the reduction of real value to cash value is morally unjustifiable within his own merely practical and reductively materialist metaphysics. Any political or economic outlook that wants to uphold justice and goodness cannot operate out of a reductively quantitative materialist and merely instrumental metaphysics. The Classical assumption that mind is prior to matter, and the Christian assumption that divine goodness is the grounds of material reality, means that our thoughts and our morals are derived functions of a genuinely meaningful and good reality. Here our thoughts and values always partially grasp, falteringly interpret, distort and misunderstand Logos and Goodness, for the divine is prior to and unlike us, we are not prior to and creators of the divine. Even so, we think most truly and act in ways that are most good when we partially creatively participate in Logos and Goodness. In fact, I cannot see how thought could be really meaningful and life could be really valuable were this not possible. If it is not possible, then the belief that there is no real quality or meaning in reality is just as meaning-ful/less as is the belief that there is; signification becomes the mere co/miss-relation of linguistic symbols within a system of arbitrary and every shifting interpretations that have – in the final analysis – only a use ‘value’. Derrida cannot be avoided (or understood) if this is the case.26 In short, I can see no good reason why metaxu and divinity should be seen  as demonstrably unrealistic by any modern materialist metaphysical stance as I cannot see how meaning and value could have any reality at all (let alone how such a materialism could have any real meaning or value) within modern materialism. Indeed, I can see every reason why such a materialist stance can make no meaningful sense of reason and meaning as we actually – that is really, however partially – experience them. I cannot see how the modern reduction of ‘the real’ to mere moving bodies in the void can be in any sense a realistic outlook on the world that we actually experience. Further, materialist hermeneutic assumptions can make no theological sense of the doxological nature of human societies, and yet valuing

158  Paul Tyson an object of worth is inescapable for purposive human action on both individual and collective scales. We are worshipping beings.

Conclusion Working from the premise that Platonist theological conceptions of cultural constructions are at least intellectually viable, let us take Mammon seriously. To make the acquisition of money a valuable enterprise in its own right is to put a means in the place of an end. When Mammon becomes the normative principle of meaning and power within any given way of life, that way of life becomes defined by a toxic doxological axis around which all the activities and structures of that society gradually come to revolve. Within modern corpuscular materialism that core, by definition, is a human construction (an object of our own making), but it remains a religious construction for it is the collective life orienting high object of meaning and value; it is the god we worship. Even though we all know that money and the world of finance is an abstractly and instrumentally constructed world of no inherent (that is real) value or meaning, we must still have a common high object of value and meaning. Social realities are always constructed around some common object of worship. The construction of any collective lifeworld-orienting core that is not tied back in mystery to divinity that stands above us is, in the categories of the Abrahamic religions, idolatry. The consequence of idol worship is a lack of contact with the divine source of true value and meaning and the generation of cultural entropy towards entrenched exploitation, immorality and meaninglessness.27 It is also a profound debasement of our humanity.28 Today shopping is the liturgy of the consumer life form. Thus: Mammon is the god of the consumer life form; ‘economic growth’ is the only summum bonum of our political discourse; the pursuit of financial security and advancement is the primary enterprise of the adult life. In this habitus we are formed to live as if we are just material beings pursuing needs and wants defined by instinct and social conditioning. Neoliberal ‘realism’ – as mirrored by professional sport – has an agonistic glory culture of the same basic nature described by Augustine in the City of God as that of pagan Rome. The objects of worth of pagan Rome and neoliberal consumerism are both blind to the exploitation of the weak by the strong, the small by the big, the poor by the rich, the meek by the ruthless. Domination is a key value to this way of life. Surprisingly, we do not see how profoundly religious this all is. We are not recognizing how basic value and meaning is to our way of life and how essential a unifying object of worship is to make this way of life work as a collectively viable enterprise. We do not appreciate how fundamental religion is to any common way of life, and why, for religious reasons, the subversion of the very idea of real value is essential to upholding the worth of merely financial value as (ironically) a meaningful end. The collective dynamic of false divinization (idolatry) does not fail to be itself religious and doxological just because it is false and secular.

Mammon and the subversion of values  159 The Classical vision of substantial reality could not think of the natural in isolation from the divine,29 and even in the 19th century there were still some who saw sociology through a genuinely theological lens (Kierkegaard 1978). But our problem is we can no longer conceive of true divinity in terms of the actual day to day reality we experience, and we can no longer conceive of any doxological core that is not an idol. Nietzsche’s philosophy with a hammer is not much good to us if everything he tapped, including his own poesis, rings hollow as an idol (Nietzsche 2009). In this context it now seems that the subversion of real value – the total displacement of the divine from the realm of human society – is so effectively done that the very notion of distinction between true worship and idolatry has become meaningless. We cannot see the doxological and destructive power of Mammon, or any idol, any more. In this context the eschatological Kingdom of Mammon is dawning, with its relentless tendency towards violence and unsustainable exploitation on an aggressive global scale with epoch changing force (Girard 2010). But Mammon is a god of no intrinsic value, and we risk becoming as valueless and amoral as the primary object of worth centring our global civilization. Herein lies destruction. For this sort of subversion inevitably gives birth to its own demise. If the prophets are right, this subversion can itself only be subverted by the recovery of true value, by the renewal of right worship.30

Notes 1 See, for example, the documentary film about the power hubs of the prevailing global financial system written and directed by Mark Donne, The UK Gold (2013). 2 See these fascinating accounts of the International Monetary Fund – Stiglitz (2002); the World Bank – Monbiot (2003); and the workings of the Eurogroup – Varoufakis (2017). The dynamics illustrated in these text are arguably better described in theological terms – Bell (2012); and even in terms of the demonic – Ross (2014); and Wink (1992) – than in any other terms. 3 George (2015); this is George’s term for the class of global financial elites who meet in Davos at the World Economic Forum. 4 ‘Lifeworld’ or ‘Lebenswelt’ is a notion in 20th century phenomenological and sociological thinking which refers to the self-evident world of shared experiences located within the normative practices of daily life. That is, ‘lifeworld’ refers to how we live together within the operational realities constructed by the deeply assumed social, political, cultural, economic and intellectual background norms of any given common way of life. 5 Just three texts out of myriads: on how central tax havens are to the global economy, see Shaxon (2012); on the incredible leverage and power of the staggeringly improbable world of high finance, see Das (2011); on the way public institutions and public money protected profligate private profiteering in the 2008 crisis, see Ferguson (2012). 6 For some expositions of this see Burkert (1985: 305–338), Cushman (1958), Howland (2004), Schindler (2008) and Tyson (2014). 7 See William Desmond’s many fine recent explications of different aspects of the metaxological metaphysical outlook (Desmond 1995, 2001, 2008). 8 All of Plato’s writings are dialogues, specifically spatiotemporally situated conversations between embodied interlocutors. The quest for insight into the

160  Paul Tyson eternal, divine and intellective realm of forms – the realm in which all embodied realities partially participate – is always pursued from the dialectical context of transient historical specificity in Plato’s writings and illustrated existentially by the example of Socrates. 9 See Plato’s famous allegory of the cave in Republic, 514–517. Here, the imaginative use of shadows on the cave wall (the world of perception), combined with human voices (projections of human meaning onto perceptions) by a minority of powerful social manipulators, characterizes the normal social construction of reality. See Berger and Luckmann (1971) The Social Construction of Reality for the classic 20th century sociology of knowledge account the manner in which society constructs the very terms of lived reality that are normative to it. 10 See Plato, Republic, 477a–480a. This passage is a complex discussion of ‘the between’ and its relation to opinion and wisdom. After the 17th century it is hard for us to follow Plato’s conception of the metaxological, because the realm of tangible experience (the ‘knowledge’ of which we now call science) is always a realm of opinion to Plato, and indeed Plato would call modern scientists lovers of opinion, not lovers of truth or wisdom. Yet Plato wishes to uphold the metaxological indeterminacies of our spatiotemporal experience of the world – in which we are deeply embedded – without negating true knowledge. This cannot be unpacked here, but I maintain that Plato’s genius is precisely tied up with his sharp sensitivity to how our experience of existence – encompassing both ‘science’ and action – is of a metaxological realm whilst yet refusing to hold that truth itself is relative, contingent and unknowable. 11 On the corpuscular metaphysical revolution of the 17th century that produced this modern conception of realism, see Pasnau (2011). 12 See Gerson (2009). In this fascinating text Gerson points out that Mind and thought in the cosmos were taken as foundational by the main streams of ancient epistemology, rather than as constructs that could be derived from more primitive material realities, such as is now largely assumed within modernity. Epistemologically, the reasons for this are obvious and persuasive. If our conception of material reality relies on thought, reason, language, meaning and order to arrive at the view that mere material contingency is the only ultimate reality, then we have cut the branch off that we are sitting on. Further, the ancients thought that qualities cannot be derived from quantities, and that while mental realities (such as thought itself) are dependent on material mediums for their actualization within tangible existence, thought cannot be reduced to matter, and ‘lower’ matter could not derive ‘higher’ thought (though matter itself as the divinely blessed and creative principle of concretizing potentiality is no debase entity in either patristic or scholastic Christianity). So in Christian theology, whilst spirit is ‘higher’ than matter in the Classical fashion, and cannot be reduced to matter, in our humanity both matter and spirit together are blessed. To the ancients, the intellective was thought of as naturally prior to the material as the lower must be dependent on the higher, not the other way around. In broad terms, this is what the ancient conception of divinity entails; there is an intellective reality that is ontologically prior to material reality. 13 As Pierre Hadot (2002) helpfully points out, ancient philosophy is a way of life governed by key ‘doctrinal’ commitments, entailing moral and intellectual disciplines, pursued within the community of a distinctive school. There are many types of Platonism; the ‘school’ of Platonism this chapter works from – here understood in orthopraxis as much as doxological and ‘doctrinal’ terms – is roughly patristic Christian Platonism in ontology with something of an Aquinan neoplatonic tweak, with a nod to Aristotle, in matters of science, ethics and logic.

Mammon and the subversion of values  161 14 See Gerson (2005). There are real differences between Plato and Aristotle, but there is also a lot of common ground. On all tangible things having a divinely gifted essence from beyond themselves, Plato and Aristotle differ decisively about what ‘beyond’ entails, but both reject Democritus’ stance where there are only atoms and the void such that value and order are only apparent glosses on a meaningless kinetic materiality. In this chapter, I will use terminology that conflates Plato and Aristotle where they largely agree and refer to either Plato or Aristotle where the difference in emphasis justifies distinguishing them. 15 Aristotle’s classic treatment of money can be found in his Politics, I, 8–10. See Scott Meikle’s discussion of the ongoing relevance of Aristotle’s theory of money, concerning Aristotle’s nuanced ethical evaluation of chrematistike (money making) and his unequivocally negative evaluation of the unnatural and immoral ‘breeding of money with money’ –obolostatike (usury) – in Meikle (1994). 16 See Aristotle, Politics, I, 9–10 for Aristotle’s explanation of how unnatural the unlimited idea of the pursuit of money for its own sake is, and how money treated as an end in itself feeds a fundamentally and aggressively disordered desire. 17 Marx stands in a complex relation to the argument I am making here. Few saw the link between the ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ of the produced, exchanged and fetishized commodity as clearly as Marx (1976: 163). I agree with Marx that markets and the role of money in facilitating the reduction of value to exchange are deeply religious/magical in nature. Further, the critique of Mammon agrees with The Communist Manifesto’s strident denunciation of the reduction of all value to exchange value by the bourgeoisie drivers of the capitalist free market wherein there is now ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”… it has resolved personal worth into exchange value’ (Marx and Engels 1967: 82). I agree with Marx that there is often an astonishing negative transubstantiation going on in the very process of monetary exchange. However, Marx is a key figure in the materialist reduction of 19th century progressivism, a reduction which is both a root and branch rejection of divinity itself, and a materialist religious move of self-worship (idolatry in traditional theological terms): ‘Religion is the illusory sun about which man revolves as long as he does not revolve about himself’ (Tucker 1978: 54). So, Marx is an ally to a Platonist theological account in seeing the magical, religious and metaphysical dynamics of financialized trade and capitalist economic relationships characterized by the sale of labour, the ownership of the means of production and relations mediated through money. And yet Marx explicitly sees magic, metaphysics and religion in materialist terms, terms entirely incompatible with a Platonist conception of divinity and metaxological metaphysics. 18 See Goodchild (2009: 7–14) for a fascinating sketch of the modern origins of credit as money with the formation of the Bank of England in 1694. 19 See this account of the rise of the 16th century doctrine of natura pura (Dupré 1993: 171–189). 20 See Merchant, C. (1983) The Death of Nature, pp. 168–172. Quoting Francis Bacon (168): “For you have but to follow and as it were and hound nature in her wanderings… for the further disclosure of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.” (168) “There is therefore much ground for hoping that there are still laid up in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use … only by the method [of forceful experimental interrogation] can they be speedily and suddenly and simultaneously presented and anticipated.” (169) 21 On medieval conceptions of just price and just wage, see Wood (2002: 132–158). 22 With Robert Pasnau I think this process was made possible by the metaphysical revolution of the 17th century. However, the full separation of older conceptions

162  Paul Tyson

23 24 25

26

27

28

of wisdom from mere scientific facts does not become firmly established as a natural feature of the modern sociological lifeworld until well into the 19th century (see Harrison 2006). This, in fascinating sociological argument, is a central point made by Latour (1993). ‘Real value’ is here a Platonist contrast term to ‘exchange value’. In passing it is worth noting that Christianity does not take polytheism seriously. Not only does it believe that there is only one God and all the ‘gods’ are not God, but it maintains that all idol worship – and arguably all religion, see Yannaras (2013) – is really self-worship. Augustine points this out in The City of God XIV, 28 by finding that what differentiates pagans from Christians is not doctrine as such but the object of first love, God or self. See Derrida (2016) Of Grammatology. I intend no slur against Derrida by this comment whom I read as almost a follower of Johann Georg Hamann. I take it that the richness of Derrida’s understanding of language is strikingly preempted by Hamann. See Hamann’s profound understanding of language and meaning in Haynes (2007: 205–218). What distinguishes Hamman from Derrida, however, is Hamman’s faith in the divine nature of Logos. Hamann is a Platonist theologian in the terms I have outlined. Derrida genuinely cannot believe whether or not meaning and value are real. See again Brueggemann (2016). The scriptures relentlessly critique what ­Brueggemann describes as the economics of extraction, which – for the sake of accumulating wealth and power of elites – is at the root of all systemic human oppression. Psalm 135: 15–18: The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes but they do not see; they have ears but they do not hear, and there is no breath in their mouths. Those who make them and all who trust in them shall become like them.

Note here that the lifeless idol does not perceive reality, and the makers of idols come to be like their object of worship and also do not perceive reality. A biblical outlook on idolatry maintains that the worship of artfully constructed (and hence false) value set up to facilitate our own power leads one away from real life itself. See Deuteronomy 30:19–20: ‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Therefore chose life so that you and your descendants shall live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him…’ 29 See for example in Metaphysics Book VI (E) where Aristotle talks about first philosophy in the terms of theology. To Aristotle the divine grounds of meaning and value in nature provide the premises of a meaningful understanding of what is actually there in nature. 30 See Brueggemann (2001). The prophetic imagination is the ability to image an alternative to the ‘realism’ of amoral pragmatic force, tied back to a vision of divine meaning and reality.

Bibliography Aristotle (1933) Metaphysics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aristotle (1944) Politics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Augustine (1984) The City of God, London: Penguin. Bell, Daniel (2012) The Economy of Desire, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Berger, Peter and Thomas, Luckmann (1971) The Social Construction of Reality, London: Penguin.

Mammon and the subversion of values  163 Brueggemann, Walter (2001) The Prophetic Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Brueggemann, Walter (2016) Money and Possessions, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Burkert, Walter (1985) Greek Religion, Oxford: Blackwell. Cushman, Robert (1958) Therapeia, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Das, Satyajit (2011) Extreme Money, Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press. Derrida, Jacques (2016) Of Grammatology, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Desmond, William (1995) Being and the Between, Albany: State University of New York Press. Desmond, William (2001) Ethics and the Between, Albany: State University of New York Press. Desmond, William (2008) God and the Between, Oxford: Blackwell. Donne, Mark (2013) The UK Gold, London: Brass Moustache. Dupré, Louis (1993) Passage to Modernity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ellul, Jacques (1986) Money and Power, Southampton: Marshall Pickering. Ferguson, Charles (2012) Inside Job, London: OneWorld. George, Susan (2015) Shadow Sovereigns, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gerson, Llody (2005) Aristotle and other Platonists, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gerson, Lloyd (2009) Ancient Epistemology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Girard, René (2010) Battling to the End, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Goodchild, Philip (2009) Theology of Money, Durham: Duke University Press. Hadot, Pierre (2002) What Is Ancient Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrison, Peter (2006) ‘Disjoining Wisdom and Knowledge: Science, Theology and the Making of Western Modernity’, in Willem Drees, Zbigniew Liana, and Hubert Meisinger (eds) Wisdom or Knowledge? London: T & T Clark International. Haynes, Kenneth (ed.) (2007) Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howland, Jacob (2004) The Republic, the Odyssey of Philosophy, Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books. Keynes, John (1997) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, New York: Prometheus Books. Kierkegaard, Søren (1978) Two Ages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marx, Karl (1976) Capital, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1967) The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin. Meikle, Scott (1994) ‘Aristotle on Money’, Phronesis 39, 1: 26–44. Merchant, Carolyn (1983) The Death of Nature, New York: HarperOne. Monbiot, George (2003) Age of Consent, London: Flamingo. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2009) Twilight of the Idols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pasnau, Robert (2011) Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

164  Paul Tyson Plato (1937) Republic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classics. Ross, Chanon (2014) Gifts Glittering and Poisoned, Eugene, OR: Cascade. Schindler, David C. (2008) Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Shaxon, Nicholas (2012) Treasure Islands, London: Vintage Books. Stiglitz, Joseph (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents, London: Allen Lane. Tucker, Robert (1978) The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, London: W.W. Norton. Tyson, Paul (2014) Returning to Reality, Eugene, OR: Cascade. Varoufakis, Yanis (2017) Adults in the Room, London: The Bodley Head. Welby, Justin (2016) Dethroning Mammon, London: Bloomsbury. Wink, Walter (1992) Engaging the Powers, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Wood, Diana (2002) Medieval Economic Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yannaras, Chirstos (2013) Against Religion, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press.

9 Neoclassical economics as a logic of subversion Arpad Szakolczai

Subversion is an activity associated with radical politics and art. It means an effort – usually combined with plotting and similar secret, underground activities – to undermine established powers and authorities. However, this chapter, in line with the general orientation of the volume, starts from the presumption that we today, all of us, inside the ‘advanced’ world, live inside subversion. Thus, as the activity of subversion is only apparently self-­ evident, so better start by exploring the meanings of the word. Dictionary definitions of subversion, and of related terms like ‘undermine’ and ‘overthrow’, contain three points of interest. Most evidently, such an activity involves a degree of violence; though this is combined with secrecy, a link that will prove to be particularly important. Furthermore, such activities aim with particular vigour not directly at the prevailing powers, trying to avoid a direct – and usually hopeless – confrontation; rather they aim at the foundations. In one reading, subversion tries to inflict blows ­below the belt; in another, particularly clear in the term ‘undermine’, it operates by generating a void,1 into which the entity falls due to its own weight. Finally, all this involves a fundamental reversal of the vertical perspective or order of things: whatever previously was high is brought down, and whatever was low consequently moves up. Such an idea was central to the Tabula Smaragdina (Linden 2003), a key piece of hermetic writings, while on different note ‘turning the world upside down’ also for the activity of circus clowns. The focus of this paper is not on present subversive activities but on reading the present as generated by a long-term historical process of subversion. In trying to map the experience of living in a subverted, upside-down world literature, in particular, novels offer a privileged starting point. A main aim of the modern novel was to make sense of living in a world where reality became increasing unreal, an experience that modern sociology or philosophy, fixated with positivism and logic, cannot handle (Szakolczai 2016, 2017). A  unique attempt to connect this feeling with the activity of subversion is offered in Goethe’s late autobiography. The metaphor of undermining is pivotal to the way Goethe came to understand the processes which he lived through.

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Undermining in Goethe and Dostoevsky The term appears at a crucial place of Poetry and Truth. It is deployed to stunning effect: Goethe claims that shortly after he finished university and started to work in the legal profession, he came to the realisation that ‘civil society’ had been ‘undermined by a frightful labyrinth’ (Goethe 2015: 931), visible in the destruction of entire families around him. But how could a society be ‘undermined’? And what perpetrates such an activity? A second use of the word offers some clarification: it was the ‘youth’ as such that ‘undermined’ (untergraben) itself, with its unhappiness and self-hatred, leading to ever more excessive, unsustainable and unacceptable demands, due to its unsatisfiable passions and imagined sufferings (943). The third occasion offers a different logic: chandlers (955). A triple diagnosis is not accidental or isolated but a main structuring device in some of the most important sections of the work (Books XI–XIII), dealing with Goethe’s formative experiences from his late teens into his early twenties, background to his first works, especially Werther, with which he skyrocketed to eternal fame. It includes the three times he discusses Voltaire, Lessing and the ‘spirit of times’ under his youth, as embodied and expressed in his generation, where Goethe tries to capture the underlying mood just before the French Revolution. The term rhymes with underground activities, in particular the digging of tunnels under the ground, or mining. Strikingly, the main character of the first volume of Wilhelm Meister, Jarno, who in the second volume would use the name Montan (derivative of ‘mountain’), is obsessed with mining. Even further, the quasi-Masonic secret society of which he is a key member, the ‘Society of the Tower’, is working ‘underground’, while the term ‘labyrinth’ is emphatically used to characterise their activities and appearance (see Citati 1990: 115). The model for this was possibly a jocose association set up by colleagues of Goethe in Wetzlar, where the stages of initiation were organised according to degrees of transitionality; thus, the first was called ‘transition’, the second ‘transition to transition’, while the fourth ‘transition to transition of the transition to transition [des Übergangs Übergang zu des Übergangs Übergang]’ (Goethe 2015: 851); or permanent transitoriness raised on the third power. The evocative force of the metaphor goes even further. ‘Undermining’ generates void, or emptiness, thus causing the entity ‘undermined’ to collapse or fold by its own weight. It is thus a way to destroy, decompose, dismantle and take apart, through the void; something that captures the core of the work of Newton, arch-enemy for Goethe, who supposedly not only discovered the absolute void but made it into the ‘background’ of his ‘natural philosophy’ (Horvath 2013). Even more, the void is explicitly associated in the Wilhelm Meister with theatre, while in Poetry and Truth both with a main ‘underminer’, Lessing.2 The model for such undermining activities was Voltaire (Goethe 2015: 772–778) – in particular through his attacks on the family, the institution

Neoclassical economics and subversion  167 which should rather be the positive centre of public life; and also through his campaign against respectable figures in high positions, using the press, under the hypocritical mask of searching for the truth. This resulted in the grave error of making the public believe that it itself is the real judge – a true absurdity. The nefarious influence of Voltaire extends to his continuous mocking and ridiculing whatever was held sacred – Goethe intimates that while reading Voltaire’s Saul he even had the desire to strangle him (815) – and became effective when combined with the similar activities of Rousseau and Diderot, argues Goethe, preparing a general nausea and repugnance from society, where ‘everything existing seemed to perish’ (778). As a result, in the legal profession a particularly unhealthy, cynical and sophistic mood became dominant, hurting Goethe’s sense of beauty and dignity, making ‘the worse effect on a young man who always strives for the good’ (860–861) and undermining respect for the law. It was in the context of such nausea of life (Ekel vor dem Leben), rooted in a failure of participation (922–924); suggested to the youth by a combination of English poetry, Enlightenment thinking and German theatre; and out of which Werther emerged, that the term ‘undermining’ was presented and discussed. The key distancing from Lessing concerns his previous impact – the propagation of the theatre of Shakespeare. Once Goethe recognised the deleterious impact of the Enlightenment, he understood where Lessing is coming from and what was wrong with the reading of Shakespeare he offered. He perceived that his contemporaries attributed a disproportionate attention in Shakespeare’s plays to clowns and the absurd, and that such erroneous perception could only become so widespread because it was given a first signal by Lessing, who at that time enjoyed unlimited respect (790–2). Even worse, Goethe held Lessing responsible for the bad state of German theatre, literally accusing him of corrupting German public morals, and in a very specific way. The German, says Goethe, is by nature benevolent, but comedy only generates gloating (schadenfreude) and incites disrespect for the upper classes, where in Germany Lessing played a pioneering role with his Emilia Galotti and its presumed ‘unmasking’ of the higher circles (910–1). The play perfectly chimed with the ‘spirit of the times’ (a grave error for Goethe), introducing the new fashion that intriguers must be aristocrats, while the greatest rascals had to be judges or other members of the judiciary.3 The metaphor of undermining was not limited to Goethe. A few decades later it also plays a central role in Dostoevsky, according to the chapter devoted to him in the magisterial overview of 19th-century novels by Pietro Citati, Absolute Evil. According to Citati, in the midst of working on Demons, a sudden illumination came to Dostoevsky, causing him to mutate the project and introduce a new hero, Stavrogin, figure of ‘absolute evil’, beyond the previous protagonist, Piotr Verhovensky, modelled on Nechaev. This was an illumination which made him realise that the presence of evil was much more extensive than he previously imagined: he had to start from

168  Arpad Szakolczai a much greater distance as the entire Russian society was ‘undermined’ (minato, see Citati 2000: 322–325). Given that destruction is thus achieved by the generation of void – nothingness, nil, nulla or nihil – it is of considerable interest that the two path-breakers of the idea of nihilism before Nietzsche were Jacobi, an old friend of Goethe, and Turgenev (especially in Fathers and Sons), a model figure for a character in Dostoevsky’s Demons. They jointly represent the German and Russian sources of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism, as if forecasting the two greatest nihilistic regimes of the 20th century, Nazi ­Germany and ­Bolshevik Russia. Such a literal, both literary and historical, focus on words associated with subversion, in particular undermining, helps to overcome the frequent association of subversion with explicit, direct, often even violent attacks on concrete centres of power, moving towards secrecy. In addition, in this chapter a further direction will be taken: the instrumentalisation of liminal situations by fixation. The idea that the trickster is also a ‘fixer’ was introduced by Ricketts (1965), and is used extensively in the literature (see e.g. Pelton 1980: 16; Bright 1993: 149–150); however, its exact meaning is never properly specified. One crucial hint is given by Ricketts, indicating that he closely follows Radin: the ‘trickster-fixer’ is shorthand for the ‘trickster-transformer-­ culture hero’ (Ricketts 1965: 327; about this, see Radin 1972: 160); thus in this ‘fixing’ transformation comes into play. The conceptual history of the term, as evident in the Online Etymological Dictionary, is quite intriguing. While ‘fixity’ is about solidity itself, over the centuries the word gained a new shade of meaning, through ‘repair’, towards ‘tampering with’, thus implying a mode of trickery. The chapter, however, will suggest taking the ‘trickster fixer’ in a literal sense: the trickster is someone who can actually fixate someone, even entire cultures, permanently in a liminal situation. This has a crucial corollary concerning ‘subversion’. The strategy of the ‘trickster fixer’ could be considered as the zero cost/zero risk alternative to active subversion: instead of taking up the risk of explicitly opposing holders of power, one can simply use the occasion of people being caught in a liminal situation by finding arguments through which they can be kept there – even convincing them that this is in their best interest. This also corresponds well to the idea of the trickster being an ‘occasionist’, advanced by Horvath (2009, 2013: 58, 133–134, 162, fn.27). The idea of making use of the temporary difficulties of people, for example, in order to make money out of their plight (about such a mercenary mentality, see Chapters 1 and 8), is not new. Most medieval and early modern food riots were due to such attempts by speculators in periods of draught or other natural or political disaster; a central issue also for the French Revolution. What is new in this respect in our times is that, due to the constitutional inability of rationalist thought to deal with situationality, a consequence of its universalism, cases such as ‘vulture capitalism’ or ‘ambulance chasing attorneys’ are considered perfectly legitimate ways of making money, in line

Neoclassical economics and subversion  169 with the absolute freedom of buying and selling. However, the point of this chapter is quite different. Here, the key argument is that, way beyond such extreme cases, contemporary politics and economics is now systematically based on fixing people in certain positions and identities that otherwise are related to temporary situations and activities. Such identities prominently include the ‘victim’ and the ‘consumer’ or rather ‘customer’. In both cases, politics and economics supposedly serve such people and are performed in their name and interests, often even through their willing participation. Yet our claim is that both imply a certain ‘fixing’ of identity, a permanent fixating in a temporary position, and that it is such fixing which plays a key role in all of us now living under subversion. This chapter will focus exclusively on the second case, the figure of the customer.4

In the name of the ‘customer’ Of course, in the contemporary world everyone spends a fair amount of time shopping or buying. We live in an exchange economy, so in order to procure the most basic things necessary for living we need to buy them. However, this was by no means always the case. The shift from a ‘world’ in which very little time and energy was spent on buying to our contemporary times was never much reflected upon, only considered as a kind of ‘natural’ change, a progress and development for the better. This should be revisited, and the identity or the ‘subject position’ of the ‘customer’ offers a good way to do so. Preliminary remarks: culture and language In this section only a few examples will be given to illustrate the case; a proper study would require at least a chapter on its own. To begin with, while we consider classical Athens as direct predecessor of our democracy, the ideas of classical philosophy, even of the Athenian constitution, e.g. concerning exchange, and money in particular, are quite different from ours. Thus, the three central values of Greek democracy, discussed among others by Isocrates and Polybius, were freedom, autonomy and autarchy. While even the exact meaning of freedom, and especially autonomy, differed then from the way we interpret these terms (thus, ‘autonomy’ did not refer to the individual, rather to the city-state, it being free to set up its own laws, close to what today is called ‘sovereignty’), ‘autarchy’ meant something completely deprived of value for us: the idea to be economically self-sufficient, both concerning households and the entire community. Exchange was limited to the surplus, and was thus generally frowned upon. A similar consideration concerning the very activity of shopping transpires through Hungarian language. In Hungarian, the standard word used for ‘customer’ or ‘shopper’ is vásárló, which literally refers to somebody attending a fair (vásár). While the conceptual history of terms related to ‘fairs’

170  Arpad Szakolczai and ‘markets’ is quite delicate, in all European languages, there can be no doubt that this term referred to the attendance of a rare temporary event, and by no means constituted an ‘identity’. The third point is concerned with the confusion related to contemporary English terminology. The term ‘customer’ has a very broad meaning, basically denoting the clients of any commercial venue. However, originally the term meant ‘customs official’, and even with Shakespeare it also carried the meaning of ‘prostitute’ (Othello IV.i.117), in either case a very peculiar identity, one not associated with ‘common folk’ as it is most self-evidently today. Even more, the use of even such basic economic terms is confusing. While it is clear enough that a ‘customer’ is supposed to buy, and a ‘consumer’ uses products, the problem is not that most often (at least in daily life) the two coincide but that in highly charged ideological terms, like ‘consumer sovereignty’, what is really meant is ‘costumer sovereignty’. The transition between such delicate differences, and acts, is brushed aside in conventional economic theory as irrelevant word-mongering. However, one can rather argue that they are part of the way in which the identity-fixing characteristic of economic theory and practice is systematically hidden.

Trickster fixating The logic of trickster fixating follows a prescribed sequence of steps. In the terminology of Agnes Horvath (2019), they can be considered as elements of a linear transformation process. Just as in linear algebra a configuration in a space can be transposed, through a matrix, into another, different one, here human beings are guided, through a series of steps, into a different kind of world. This can also be described as an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland-kind-­ experience’, and this may not be surprising, given that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. Step 1: misreading a liminal situation as reality The success of the transformation, especially its hiding, requires that in the first step the trickster must be as close to reality as possible; must act inside and in the name of reality. This is rendered possible by the fact, as Foucault (1982) and especially Weber (1978) were keenly aware, that the real world, or any human society or community, even any concrete, individual human being, can be in two different modes: in an ordinary, normal, accepted, takenfor-granted state; in an out-of-ordinary (außeralltäglich) situation; in a state of emergency; or, in classical terminology, in cosmos or chaos. Concerning the former, the well-ordered world, or cosmos, is a given: it is simply there, it exists, is even beautiful, for the Greeks (this is why cosmos is the etymological source of the term ‘cosmetic’); it can be taken as a gift. As for the latter, a good illustration is offered by illness: if somebody is ill, one certainly keeps existing; illness is very much real (if it is real), but an ill person, as it is often

Neoclassical economics and subversion  171 said, is not really himself or herself. All this can also be expressed in the language of liminality as illness, among many others, is a liminal condition. Here we arrive at the first stage of the trick: the trickster starts not by denying reality, building castles of sand or evoking wishful thinking but by taking the liminal situation as a real, given reality, insisting that we must face real life and accept a liminal, thus in a ‘technical’ sense unreal as transitional, reality as the starting point. Step 2: fixating in the liminal present The second step in the trickster revaluation of values is hardly distinct from the first. It indeed should be so as otherwise it would be better noticed and more objected. The key point is to render the ending of liminality, the return to the normal, ordinary state of affairs, impossible. The first stage was interpretive, suggesting that the current, liminal, unreal state of affairs was simply the real reality. The second step is the corollary: if this is reality, why would anybody consider a return to something else? Thus, without exerting any explicit pressure, people become induced to stay in a situation that was accepted only as being something temporary.5 Step 3: hiding the past Still, while this can go on for a time, as a transitory situation is clearly ‘real’ in a way, after a time people are bound to wonder about a return to normality. The mind, as it was recognised by Tarde, Girard or Gell (or by Pascal, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche), is not simply a source of ‘rationality’ as Kantian anthropological constant; rather it is a delicate organism that can easily be misled, especially by images, by image-magic or image-power. Thus, trickster machinations always primarily target the mind. The issue at stake is to alter memory, or the images one has about the past, through current sensations, and also bombarding with images. Current sensations are ­evidently stronger than memory: if we behold an object in sight, we gain a better ­i mage than when we try to recollect it. While memory is fundamental for identity, the trickster can actually alter this through images, fiddling with our sense of reality, thus ‘constructing’ an identity. By means of flooding our senses with sensations and images, saturating our mind, the past becomes obliterated. The stealing of reality is always preceded by stealing the past. Step 4: revalorising the future by prioritising it The fixing into the present, away from the past, is accompanied by a similar operation concerning the future. No matter how overwhelming the impressions gained in the present moment are, the temporal direction cannot be fully eliminated from the human mind. This is taken care of by not only fixating people in the confusing present but offering excessive promises

172  Arpad Szakolczai concerning the future. Our trickster, with disarming honesty, gladly agrees that the contemporary situation is far from being perfect but then argues, through a proper combination of carrots and sticks, that in the future all such shortcomings will be alleviated, and that we only need to trust him. And once he gets a little finger inside the door, he never can be gotten rid of as pulling out would imply acknowledging our increasingly growing losses. A combination of such attitudes with respect to past, present and future is present in the rhetoric of revolution and evolution. We live inside the revolution, where everything is changing and in an exciting way, so we just need to abandon ourselves to the ‘flow’. In addition, we are told that doing so is right and guaranteed by the theory of evolution and the idea of progress, which imply that it is in the nature of things that life is always getting better. Step 5: revalorising the past by seriously downgrading it Given that memories might always come back, the trickster – apart from focussing on the present by overvaluing it and considering it an exclusive good – also, surreptitiously, returns to the past, though only to emphasise how bad it was. Thus, over time, there is a shift from simply ignoring the past to explicitly considering it as obsolete, bypassed, worthless. But in the next stage of linear transformation new attention is focussed on the past – not in the sense of finally discovering it, refreshing genuine memories but by focussing on selected events that factually demonstrate how bad that was. This selective attention has two main points, all focussing on the same kind of events: wars, crises, genocides, mass murders, famines, all kinds of catastrophes, demonstrating on the one hand really how bad the past was, full of suffering, deprivation, oppression, horror; on the other, such past events are used to generate support for our current rulers, showing how much they were instrumental in leading us out of the nightmare that was the past. Any effort to correct this view by claiming that this was not all that was happening in ‘the’ past, and that at any rate our past extends not to a few decades but many thousands years, is brushed aside by two ‘ace-of-trumps’ arguments, supposedly silencing any dissent: first, we know that the past has no real values as it goes against the theory of evolutionary progress, and second, such dissent represents a disrespect for suffering victims. These arguments together offer a waterproof, airtight closing off of the past. Step 6: revalorising the future by downgrading it Once the real past is safely stolen, the stunning feat of stealing even the future can be accomplished. The bright promises are never actually denied or refuted; they remain hanging somewhere there, but the troubles of the present with the recurrent new crises – outcomes of crisis-mongering – ­i mply that full attention and effort is required just to stay above water. We live in a world of cutthroat competition6 where nothing can be taken for granted;

Neoclassical economics and subversion  173 if someone has no job, one must search for one; if one has a job, it is not guaranteed that it will last, as technological developments – supposedly self-generating and self-sustaining – cannot be stopped, and at any rate we have already agreed that this is where real progress lies. This is where we are right now, with generations being over-educated without having the minimal chance of a meaningful and related work in sight.

Modalities of subversion: alchemic technology, public arena, fairground economy In line with these considerations, the experience of living under subversion, in an unreal reality, can be expressed in three modalities of permanent liminality, each capturing a highest possible state of subversion: contemporary modernity as permanent war, permanent revolution and permanent fair. The first idea was suggested by Patočka (1976/7), following the philosophy of Heidegger. The second is best associated with Trotsky but was proposed programmatically as early as 1815 by the liberal economists Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer (Voegelin 1999: 216–219). This chapter, based on previous works, proposes a third idea: we do not live in a ‘market economy’ but a permanent fair. The liminal moments most connected with technological developments and the subsequent entrapment in technology are wars. It is well known that some of the most important technological innovations of the past century, like radar, computers, ATMs (any time machines) or jet engines, were due to the Second World War, though the connection has never been properly reflected upon as that would have come to challenge our idolisation of technology. Similarly, major shifts in the role of the public sphere can be connected to revolutions, where the causality is even more delicate, with revolutionary championing of the public sphere being as much a source as a consequence of revolutions. Of course, wars and revolutions historically have been connected, but the same is true for technology and the public sphere: one only has to consider the invention of the press, or of the internet, both at the same time being technological and altering the nature of the ‘public sphere’. The liminal situation most associated with the rise of the modern economy is not the market but the fair. While the two are closely connected, distinctions being time and again blurred, a basic line of separation is clear enough. Fairs vs. markets: on the origins of the stock market At a first level, the distinction between fairs and markets is straightforward. If markets are places where buyers and sellers meet to exchange goods, then a fair is a special type of periodic market. Markets take place frequently, usually weekly, while fairs are much less frequent, often being annual (see

174  Arpad Szakolczai the German word Jahrmarkt). Their duration is also different: a market lasts at most for a day, while fairs extend to a longer period. Finally, fairs also more closely follow the cycle of seasons, taking place either in early or late summer, thus underlining their liminal character. This, however, can be modified if they coincide with other seasonal festivities, like carnivals. In terms of space, the distinction is less clear-cut, yet definitely marked. Markets are closely associated with towns. Basically, each town has at least one marketplace, and the daily sociability of towns, just as interactions ­between town and countryside, often takes place there. It has even been argued that a town is nothing but a permanent marketplace (Cipolla 2005: 35). Fairs, however, only take place in certain select areas, and often outside town limits. While the semantic distinction is simple, there was a considerable confusion over time in terminology, whether in modern languages or in Antiquity. A standard German term for ‘fair’ is Messe, also meaning ‘mass’, except that Sunday is market day. In the English translation of Bakhtin ‘market’, ‘fair’ and ‘public square’ were used interchangeably, though even Bakhtin himself was not consistent in distinguishing the terms. Yet, beyond a simple linguistic confusion, there are complex social and cultural issues involved. Fairs represent a heightened level of encounter among strangers. This mode of interaction already played a major role in Weber’s definition of a town, which cannot be identified by size or function but rather as a space for the regular meeting of strangers. Markets, and especially fairs, as they always involve long-distance trade, take such encounters to another level. Thus, fairs imply a complex ensemble of cultural, political, religious and social practices, being particularly close to carnivals (Bakhtin 1984). Clarity concerning the distinction can be increased through a reading of conceptual history. The origins of related terms, places and practices, whether in Greek (panegyris, agora), Latin (mercatus, nundiae, forum) or Gaelic (Lughnasa), can be traced to ‘assembly’, understood in the most general sense (de Ligt 1993). Such assembly was the meeting place of a community, understood in a broad sense, including people dispersed over quite a large area; potentially every human being was involved. Archaeological evidence offers few hints concerning the origins of settlement: while we don’t know why our distant ancestors settled, such settlements grew out of temporary seasonal gatherings (Mithen 2003; Valla 2008). Such gatherings were eminently ‘political’, dealing with issues concerning the whole community, and they were also connected to the emergence of sanctuaries and their visitation, well visible in the Irish tradition. The same considerations apply to Greek city-states, which grew out of sanctuaries (de Polignac 1995). Over time, the social aspects of fairs became predominant, especially through an intertwining of fairs and carnivals. While the relevance of such remote periods for understanding modernity might not be immediately evident, questions about the sources of markets, debts and business culture are increasingly posed (Roberts 2011).

Neoclassical economics and subversion  175 The more specifically monetary significance of fairs is usually associated with the Champagne fairs in the 13th century and connected to both a general increase of prosperity and the activity of the counts of Champagne (Bautier 1970; Edwards and Ogilvie 2012). These fairs, however, in no way represented a break with the rhythm of medieval life (Herlihy 1997). After the devastations caused by the plague and a series of wars, the role of the Champagne fairs was taken up by the Brabant fairs, then Geneva, the heyday of the Geneva fairs coming around the 1450s (Van Houtte 1952; Bergier 1963). Over the 15th century, and especially from around 1450, there was a burgeoning intensity of fairs, culminating in the fairs of Lyon and Antwerp (Gascon 1971, 1977; van der Wee 1977). At this moment, a radically new idea emerged. In order to conduct business in between fairs, a new institution was created, giving rise to the stock market (Braudel 1984). Thus, the fair became permanent – together with its association with the carnival – by turning into a feast that would never end. This helps to substantiate the view that the ‘economy’ is not a Kantian universal but a specific historical formation, an illustration of the Weberian idea of how something out-of-the-ordinary (außeralltäglich) can become everyday or ‘routine’ (Veralltäglichung). In other terminology, it is an instance of ‘permanent liminality’. Increasingly permanent fairs fixated people into the flux of substitutability, accepting that whatever they ‘need’ must be acquired by some form of exchange, and therefore their lives also should be organised around the principle that they need to offer something for exchange. The move from the medieval world, in which fairs were rare and spectacular events, combined with social festivities and carnivals, to the present dominated by ‘market economies’ was completed through a series of steps, alongside a ‘linear transformation’ process. Such economies thus show permanent carnivalesque features, though at the same time they are also sacrificial (Szakolczai 2017), due to the tight connections between exchange and sacrifice, through ‘substitutability’ (about this, see Calasso 2010). The first step in this process, as we have seen, was to fixate characters in the present, meaning inside the fair. This was how the central engine of the modern economy, the stock market, was created – and then was hidden away. Not only the origins of the stock market are not known except by specialists of economic history, but the classics of political economy, even standard economics textbooks, hardly discuss the stock market.

Modalities of trickster fixating in the economy This, however, is only one part of the storyline. The other concerns the participants of fairs, which includes all members of society, even many people from afar, who are all attendants of the fairs in several capacities: as sellers but mostly as buyers and consumers, especially of foods and beverages, and as spectators. In the following, three glimpses will be offered on the

176  Arpad Szakolczai way human beings became fixated into permanent subject positions within the fairground economy, with more than a little help from the similarly ­fairground-born theatre.7 They constitute subsequent steps of a ‘perverted linear transformation process’ (Horvath 2019) when in a delicate, liminal situation the rhythm of social life becomes diverted from its normal path. Ironically, the solution offered to this crisis leads to further crisis; thus the ‘solution’ is offered by further ‘matrixing’ away from meaningful life. Three steps of this process will be sketched in the following. Griswold on tricksters and ‘cony-catchers’ The resurgence of the trickster in 16th-century theatre was identified by Wendy Griswold (1983, 1986: 38–47). The source of the stage figure was partly folk tale characters and sprites, partly the vice figure of medieval mystery plays, but it also integrated the Christian devil and the intriguer of Roman comedies, transmitted by Renaissance humanist plays. However, though Roman comedies often provided the plot structure of these plays, the new stage figure showed a number of important new features, bringing it closer to the trickster, and especially the trickster-fixer, the one who purposefully searches for opportunities to catch people in liminal conditions. ­ oman Thus, instead of simply responding to events, as characteristic of R comedies, city comedy rogues initiated them. Even more importantly, they ‘typically express far more confidence in their schemes and their wits’ (­Griswold 1986: 41). These stage figures closely corresponded to real city characters singled out for attention in contemporary pamphlets as ‘cony-catchers’. They were thieves and swindlers, mostly hidden among the crowds of vagabonds and migrants populating London at that time, often having specialised nicknames as ‘hookers’, ‘rufflers’ or ‘crossbiters’ (44–45). Their closeness to the trickster is explicitly emphasised by Griswold: ‘The operations of the ­cony-catcher were those of the trickster, involving the usual combination of opportunism, temptation, flattery, and cleverness’ (45). However, here again some special features emerged in Tudor London that some pamphleteers explicitly called ‘Iron Age London’ (47). Central to this was a combination of explicit imitation, mutual interdependence and shrewd shifting between genres and roles. Pamphleteers and playwrights were often the same persons, who on one side denounced such figures and on the other played with them in order to attract more buyers or spectators. This was particularly true for Robert Greene who ‘offered sensational material under the guise of sober advice as to how to avoid being victimised’ (46), a strategy that would be used a century or so later by Daniel Defoe when he launched the first journal oriented for mass readership, before he would immortalise nascent capitalist individualism in the character of Robinson Crusoe who, he was emphatic to point out, was a character in real life (see Szakolczai 2015, 2016: 52, 58). It was the same Robert Greene who famously called Shakespeare an

Neoclassical economics and subversion  177 ‘upstart crow’, being upset not simply because Shakespeare imitated him but because he tried to move beyond the mere titillation of the audience. Here we stumble upon the fourth instance of systematic confusion, after that of cony-catchers and vagabonds, stage characters and real crooks, and pamphleteers and playwrights. The main buyers of pamphlets, just as spectators of theatrical comedies, were the ‘gallants’, often victims of cony-catchers, but at the same time often themselves being tricksters, as seducers: ‘the gallants were just cony-catchers from good families’, only more hypocritical (46–47). Thus, the stage was already set for the later debate between actors, playwrights and Puritans, dominating the 17th century, about the merits of the theatre, each side accusing the other of being hypocritical (Agnew 1986: 131–133; Szakolczai 2013: 3, 213) – where the classical Greek meaning of the term was nothing else but ‘theatrical actor’.8 Agnew on theatres and markets The theatre, according to Agnew, was ‘incubator’ or ‘laboratory’ (­Agnew 1986: xi, 12, 54) of modern capitalism as it promoted undifferentiation by problematising and destroying existing social borderlines. It staged aspects of everyday life and behaviour but only in a highly abstracted and distorted manner, which was then fed back as a positive or negative model to the broad populace, instigating change in the sense of consuming the borderlines and thus liberating the void. Acting together, money and theatre helped to construct a ‘world that threatened to become, in effect, a permanent carnival’ (54).9 The subversion of regular everyday social life, by the actor and the merchant, could be joint as both focussed on the same – highly alchemic10 – ­target of dissolving the boundaries, ultimately the very forms that kept things together, inside an order that was both meaningful and reflected the beauty of the cosmos. Theatre as comedy had to attack such boundaries as it could draw laughter and applause by showing things from a reverse perspective, capitalising on and perpetuating the carnivalesque experience of a world turned upside down. The impresario, on the other hand, similarly had to dissolve such forms as this was the precondition of things being offered up for exchange in the ‘market’. This establishes the crucial complicity – or parasitical pact – between ‘market’ and ‘theatre’: the ‘market’, through the charlatan-entrepreneur, maintains and finances the theatre, thus the livelihood of the actor, who otherwise was a vagabond, migrating from fair to fair and court to court, subject to the vagaries of municipal authorities or the king; while the theatrical actor promotes the ‘market’ by presenting on stage caricature figures, decontextualised of all social ties, thus reducing human motivation to mere desire and gain and human relationships to antagonistic duels, verbal or physical, or bargains. Such reductionism is fundamental for the market as such human beings will be the ideal consumers – trying to satisfy their desires, and producers – trying to sell in order to gain more, thus

178  Arpad Szakolczai competing with other producers, reducing social life to competition, while also soliciting increasing sympathy for the previously outcast merchants for whom indeed gain is the only moving factor of human life. Agnew emphasises that this complicity of merchants and actors was new in England, and that it generated enormous confusion. People of all sorts were trying to understand what was going wrong through the increasing commercialisation and theatricalisation of their own lives but were failing to come up with a proper analysis and response, up to our era (3–6). This failure turned out to be momentous as ‘these answers accumulated over time’, forming ‘an imposing ideological edifice on their own’, including a ‘new grammar of motives’ whose ‘authority rested as well on repeated acts of selected inattention’ to the ways in which the ambiguities of market activity ‘continued to subvert the new categories of explanation’ (6), thus being transformed into a kind of mental prison into which subsequent generations were entrapped. The possibility of such understanding was further undermined by a ‘rogue’ pamphleteer literature, which purported to critically attack commercialisation and theatricalisation but actually only contributed to further confusion and the promotion of these same trends. This is not surprising as the authors of these pamphlets were often just as vagrants as the actors; and furthermore, such use of the printing press was much promoted by charlatans. Even more, there was a cross-pollination between rogues and wondering preachers, a confusion only accentuated by the dissolution of the monastic orders, given that previously in England there was a particularly large number of Dominican and Franciscan mendicant friars, now often living by fairgrounds and marketplaces, preaching and selling their pamphlets. It was out of this unprecedented liminal confusion that the first ‘critical literature’ of Europe emerged, a product of rogue preachers and charlatans, a genuine ‘pudenda origo’ of the art of critique, as again ­Shakespeare realised it and again in Othello, through the (autobiographical) Iago (‘I am nothing, if not critical’; Othello II.i.122; see for details Szakolczai 2013: 225–227). Agnew offers a convincing explanation for the increasingly central, indeed privileged, role played by the theatre in further perpetuating such changes, also reflecting on their significance. The gradual undermining and destruction of the boundary markers of human existence targeted moments of transition in the ‘human cycle’ (Turnbull 1985) by attacking the traditional boundary markers through ridiculing or satirically enacting them on stage (Agnew 1986: 97),11 thus dissolving them into nothingness. As a result, a ‘sense of transition [became] a permanent feature of personal life’ as ‘[l]ife now resembled an infinite series of thresholds’ (97–98), making the threshold experience coincide with the market, or de-ritualised commodity exchange. Permanent transitoriness implies permanent confusion, uncertainty and opaqueness, where any ‘critical’ effort to finally shed new light on what is going on, or ‘unmask’ the persons lying in the background, only further

Neoclassical economics and subversion  179 proliferates the same bewilderment, disseminating further suspicion and undermining figures of respect. This culminates in the utter paradox that the theatre, main instrument in perpetuating confusion, at the same time became ‘the most credible instrument with which to visualise […] the lost transparency of these ordinary acts’ (98). However, the dissolving of boundaries is only the first part of an alchemic opus; the second concerns the re-fusion of the ‘liberated’ elements into a new unity. Here the key issue concerns the manner in which the ‘happy’ encounter between merchant and actor was played out on stage, and the broader effect it produced. At the general level, this starts with the affinities between the world of business and the theatre. Apart from and beyond the negative act of liquefying every stable borderline, such affinities extend to their mode of operation, the continuous metamorphosis of everything into everything else, whether through the principle of imitative enactment or of monetary equivalence through buying and selling. Such analogies, present already in the fairground, reached their apogee with the delocalisation of exchange in the stock exchange. Once the immediacy of contact between buyers and sellers in a concrete place was removed, ‘commercial transactions [… began] to take on the perceived character of a script drafted elsewhere and enacted by a proxy’ (98).12 Beyond the level of institutions, identification also directly targeted at the level of persons. The outcome was captured with particular clarity in a poem by John Hall, a poet personally close to Hobbes: “Man in business is but a Theatricall person, and in a manner but personates himself” (as in 97). Such an identity, like everything in the new world made in the image of fairground, is ambivalent and profoundly so as it ineradicably implies dissimulation and hypocrisy at the heart of business, even though what businessmen most need in order to operate is trust, which requires a modicum of genuineness. Still, the most basic alchemic operation of the theatre to render capitalism acceptable was to reverse the uniformly negative view of merchants. In every society at every moment of human history merchants were despised and hardly tolerated as they did not belong anywhere and therefore by their very being represented a threat to the conditions of stability that are the necessary prerequisite to meaningful social life. Not surprisingly, any theory of corruption was always oriented against intermediaries (22, referring to Pocock). Central for the theatre, going back to the fairground shows, was to reverse such general negative view and drum up support for the merchant, its employer; a process culminating in mid-18th century ‘bourgeois comedy’ (Szondi 1980; Szakolczai 2015). Agnew’s book is organised around a shift from focus on the actor in the 17th century to the spectator in the 18th. A decisive role in this transition is played by Adam Smith. According to Agnew (1986: 182–186), the primary issue for the earlier work of Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is not the presumption of mutual benevolence as the taken for granted

180  Arpad Szakolczai foundation of economic society – though this also plays its part – but making the disinterested spectator the source of moral judgment. It is this perspective that would be further extended and universalised by Kant. This shift, however, only captures one stage in the linear transformation process. Before the actor, we have seen, there was the cony-catcher, and the huge numbers of unsettled migrants, who were the permanent audience to fairs; while after the Smithian spectator discussed by Agnew, the focus shifted on the customer. In still later stages of this perverted linear transformation process – and here we need to make a huge jump in time, to offer a third illustration – a major role was played by the World Fairs (Silla 2013, 2018). A glimpse about such a role, focussing on the 1939 New York World Fair, is offered by a major maverick figure of historiography, Warren Susman (1984). Susman on the 1939–1940 New York World Fair This World Fair, according to Susman, represents something like the apotheosis of the myth of the ‘people’ in the American imagination, combining the American dream with a similar obsession with numbers (Susman 1984: 211–212). The chronotope (the term is from Bakhtin and can be defined as a particularly significant time-space configuration or a coincidence of spatial and temporal liminality) New York 1939 is highly symbolic, coupling American ‘people’ with German Volk, though prominent to the myth of the American people was not race or state, rather the fair (215). As Ed Tyng claimed in his Preface of his 1958 book, the Fair was made for the people, for You; it was supposed to both delight and instruct the masses; the Fair was made to educate the people but also to do something much more: ‘to create the people in the most ideal sense of the concept’ (213–214). In order to perform such a formative trick, the Fair was supposed to offer ‘enough unusual, varied, and preferably “revolutionary” spectacles and entertainments to attract masses of people’ (Tyng, as in 215–216). It thus had to generate an unprecedented feast; a ‘rich and colourful festival’ (216), which would create an experience that people would remember for the rest of their lives (217). This required, first of all, a master of ceremonies, and Grover A. Whelan, chairman of the Committee on Receptions of the Fair, considered himself just that: a ‘master of pomp and ceremony’ (216). This meant that he understood his own role as the organiser of the World Fair as a merchant and master showman (216) but interpreted this in the full and original sense of the fairground charlatan or impresario, organising troupes of entertainers. The Fair was full of ‘strolling players [like] singers, dancers, musicians, acrobats, clowns’, all hired by management (New York Times, 5 May 1939, as in 216). The Fair was promoted through a systematic confusion between commercial gain and nationalism as the Fair incorporated the historic celebrations of the 150th year of George Washington’s presidency, and this combination culminated in carnivalesque features: ‘Fair attendance

Neoclassical economics and subversion  181 became equated with patriotic duty. The whole occasion had become a carnival’ (217).13 In order to have this effect, which included nothing less than the ‘creation’ of a homogenous people, the most striking trick of the Fair was to focus not only on machines but on processes. The greatest process was the people themselves as crowds, both as an actor and as the decoration of power, being visible particularly clearly in the perverse manner by which crowds sheepishly follow everything, especially itself: ‘the crowd’s greatest pleasure is in the crowd’ (218).14 Thus, the apotheosis of the crowds through the Fair was at the same time the total demise of the value of concrete human beings, the cynical debasing of humans into a faceless crowd, followed by the corollary supposedly justifying the original cynicism and confirming the prejudice that human beings manipulatively reduced to a homogenous mass are not better than herd animals. The Fair even discovered and promoted as a most important trick to realise its aims ‘the “miraculous powers of advertising”’ (220). In his conclusion Susman evoked, through direct quotes from 1940, images of amphitheatre, circus clown and double talk but also that this will be spread ‘all over the world. Alas!’ (229). American globalised capitalism is the subversiveness of permanent fairground reaching planetary levels.

The trickster terminology of modern economics Within the limits of this chapter, it is not possible to trace any further this history of tricky fixating, resulting in the modern ‘economic society’. In this last section one element will be singled out for attention, the role of double talk in the victory of modern economic thinking and mentality. This generated a vocabulary that is partly a sinister play with words, involving the purposeful altering and thus destruction of meaning, and partly the invention of a new vocabulary, technical terms only accessible for the initiates. Both together serve to hide the transformative character of the rise of the ‘modern economy’, the fact that it does not represent a progress of rationality but stages in a linear transformation process, which fixates everyone in a permanent flux while hiding it from view. The four words selected only represent the tip of the iceberg that sank Europe. ‘Utility’: the surreptitious replacing of ‘utility’ with ‘pleasure’ as the measuring rod of ‘economic behaviour’ Utility as a term goes back to Aristotelian ethics and the related concern with oikonomia, or the governing of a household. It has nothing to do with the kind of pleasure maximisation that underlies neoclassical economics, founded by Jevons, Walras and Menger. In fact, the very word ‘economy’, while directly traced to Aristotle’s oikonomia, has a meaning completely

182  Arpad Szakolczai different from his. For Aristotle, oikonomia was strictly limited in the private sphere. ‘Political economy’ as a term was invented in the first decades of the 17th century, appearing first in writings by a series of French figures with strong Huguenot allegiances; while the term ‘economic life’ goes back to Rabelais (Szakolczai 2016: 44–47). In this long semantic history, emphasis gradually shifted (a clear linear transformation going on here on its own!) from utility to money, as evidenced with the term ‘political economy’ being replaced by ‘economics’ around 1900. A pioneer in this process was ­Hermann Heinrich Gossen, a Prussian bureaucrat who became a patron of inns and taverns, ‘experimenting’ with optimising the proper number of pints to drink, and building a theory on this in the 1840s. While his work went unnoticed, it was later discovered by Menger and Jevons, founding ­figures of neoclassical economics (Schumpeter 1954). Economic theory never reflected on the thorough and systematic confusion of pleasure with utility at the heart of neoclassical economics. Textbooks still talk about maximising the ‘household utility function’, when they really mean individuals ­maximising their pleasures. The marginal ‘revolution’: after hedonising utility, liminalising marginality The key invention of Gossen (1983) and the neoclassical synthesis concerned not simply utility but marginal utility, formulating the psychology of maximising outcomes, especially pleasures, supposedly underlining human behaviour. By now accepted as a truism, it is unnoticed that such conduct assumes the conditions of a fair. While human beings ‘like’ to enjoy themselves, life is emphatically not reducible to a series of ‘choices’ concerning the acquisition of ‘goods’ that gives us ‘pleasure’. From the perspective of a meaningful human life, it is the absence of a concern with ‘maximising’ a concrete outcome, related to the here and there, that makes sense. The type of choice taken as a model by Jevons, Walras and Menger thus applies to fairs only. Not surprisingly, the most important related developments in the 19th century were the World Fairs, the first being in London (where Jevons was educated), to be followed by Paris (where Walras was educated), while Vienna (where Menger was educated) feverishly tried to imitate London and Paris with the 1873 World Fair. Neoclassical economics emerged out of global fairs. ‘Interest’: from temporariness in time to objectivity ‘inside’ While the semantic history of the word is surprisingly complex and little known, its etymology is most simple: interest is derived from the Latin word inter essere, ‘being in between’, epitomising liminality. It is this word that, through a series of linear transformations, became ‘matrixed’ into the very core of rational individuality, our ‘objective interest’.

Neoclassical economics and subversion  183 ‘Opportunity cost’: the cornerstone of asinine rationality The term ‘opportunity cost’ is widely considered as the main analytical discovery of Austrian economics. The underlying idea is very simple: the cost of any activity or ‘good’ is not reducible to the various actual costs and efforts – material, money, human energy, time, etc. – that were required to perform or acquire it, but includes any alternative that has been foregone. Put simply, the price of going to a cinema is not the cost of the ticket but whatever else we could have done instead. Of course, this implies anything imaginable; so instead of underlining the ‘rationality’ of choice, beyond ‘simple’ costs, the idea opened up the abyss of potentially infinite possibilities, with all the stress it involved, while also internalising a sacrificial logic inside every act. Austrian economics thus extends the scholastic puzzle known as Buridan’s ass into the paradigm of human conduct. The corollary is that economic rationality, far from representing the height of reason, rather takes the donkey as the model of human conduct. Rationality as asininity is in line with Horvath’s ideas about infantile senility (Horvath and Szakolczai 2018), just as with the failure to become contented, to get satisfaction, an experience that defined modern youth culture, as evidenced by the first major hit of the Rolling Stones.

Conclusion A subverter is a parasite but a particularly insidious one. Subversion only makes sense if there is stability, or a centre that still holds. Once all stability is gone, the subverter no longer has anything to attack, his reason of existence disappears, but so has meaning as without stability a meaningful life is impossible. Thus, subversion is also evil as evil is the transformation of substance, the rendering of whatever is valuable and meaningful into the void, nothingness, the non-substantial non-essence of evil. The subverters are, e.g., the professional revolutionaries, the ones who Foucault (2011: 211) talked about in his last Collège de France course, arguing that they replaced Faust. The ­metaphor works, except that the category should not be reduced to the Trotskists, Leninists, Stalinists and the like but should be extended, through the constitutive identity between the permanent revolution of Trotsky and the creative destruction of Schumpeter, to entrepreneurs, promoters of technological change, in particular in information and communication technology. Professional subverters give full meaning to the lines of WB Yeats, about the worst who are full of passionate intensity, in ‘The Second Coming’, a poem written in January 1919, just when Weber gave his ‘Politics as a vocation’ lecture. If subversion is evil, then it cannot and should not be resisted (Mt 5: 39). Resistance, rather, especially as an explicit, strategic purpose, is part of the strategy of evil, as it only escalates subversion, treating homeopathically evil with evil, pushing the perverted linear transformation forward.

184  Arpad Szakolczai Subversion can only be met with the Weberian sense of objectivity (­G egenstand) as a standing up and standing by: ignoring the subverter while not yielding an inch from the ground. Such stable stance is central for ­Castelli’s (2007) work on the demonic, and for Pascal’s ‘heart’, relying on the indestructible inside us.

Notes 1 About the void, implying nothingness but also the possible contact there with powers out of the ordinary, see Horvath and Szakolczai (2018). 2 On Lessing, see Szakolczai (2016: 109–126). 3 Note that for Goethe the real ‘villains’ were not the judges, rather the lawyers and journalists. 4 Concerning the first, see e.g. Achille Mbembe (2004: 11) on the ‘fixation on the past and suffering’ so much present in Africa, and a ‘frenetic claim of victimhood’. 5 The post-war experience of Communism offers a particularly clear though by no means unique such example. 6 This is another crucial, self-explanatory term from the late 19th-century USA. 7 About the rebirth of theatre out of the fairground in late-Renaissance Europe, see Szakolczai (2013). 8 Agnew’s book is a primary source for any study of the tight, formative connections between theatre and markets or fairs. 9 Strikingly, the path-breaking books of both Griswold and Agnew are from 1986 – evident reflections on Reaganomics and the rise of neoliberalism. Even more strikingly, they were not really followed up. 10 By ‘alchemic’ I mean the general idea of ‘creating’ something new by ‘destroying’ the substance and character of a concrete being, following the work of Horvath (2009, 2013). 11 See Goethe (2015: 807) about the destructive impact of satire and critique. 12 On the similarities between stock market and theatre, see also Agnew (1986: 144). 13 In his classic novel Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne already made evident the striking affinities between the political elections in Puritan New England and the carnival. 14 This is not the ‘truth’ about human nature; rather, it happens when human beings are forcefully detached from their concrete contexts, thus ‘denaturalised’, even ‘dehumanised’.

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Neoclassical economics and subversion  185 Calasso, Roberto (2010) L’ardore, Milan: Adelphi. Castelli, Enrico (2007) Il demonico nell’arte, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Cipolla, Carlo (2005) Storia economica dell’Europa pre-industriale e altri saggi, ­Bologna: Il Mulino. Citati, Pietro (2000) Il male assoluto nel cuore del romanzo dell’Ottocento, Milan: Mondadori. de Ligt, L. (1993) Fairs and Markets in the Roman Empire: Economic and Social Aspects of Periodic Trade in a Pre-industrial Society, Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben. de Polignac, François (1995) Cult, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, Jeremy and Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2012) ‘What Lessons for Economic Development Can We Draw from the Champagne Fairs?’, Explorations in Economic History 49: 131–148. Foucault, Michel (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ——— (2011) The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, London: Palgrave. Gascon, Richard (1971) Grand commerce et vie urbaine au 16. siècle: Lyon et ses marchands, Paris: SEVPEN. ——— (1977) ‘La France du mouvement, les commerces et les villes’, in F. Braudel and E. Labrousse (eds) Histoire économique et sociale de la France, Paris: PUF. Goethe, Johann W. (2015) Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit. Accessed at http://web568.rs013.glowfish.de/Joomla/images/ebook/Buch00151-Goethe-aufwww.zenisis.de.pdf Gossen, Hermann Heinrich (1983) The Laws of Human Relations, and the Rules of Human Action Derived Therefrom, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Griswold, Wendy (1983) ‘The Devil’s Techniques: Cultural Legitimation and Social Change’, American Sociological Review 48, 5: 668–680. ­ ondon ——— (1986) Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the L Theatre, 1576–1980, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Herlihy, David (1997) The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horvath, Agnes (2009) ‘Liminality and the Unreal Class of the Image-Making Craft’, International Political Anthropology 2, 1: 51–73. ——— (2013) Modernism and Charisma, London: Palgrave. ——— (2019) ‘Walling Europe: The perverted linear transformation’, in Agnes Horvath, Marius Ion Benţa and Joan Davison (eds) Walling, Boundaries and ­Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, Routledge. Horvath, Agnes and Szakolczai, Arpad (2018) Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, London: Routledge. Linden, Stanton J. (2003) The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mbembe, Achille (2004) ‘Subject and Experience’, in N. Tazi (ed) Keywords: Experience, Cape Town: Double Storey, pp. 1–18. Mithen, Steven (2003) After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5,000BC, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Patočka, Jan (1976/7) ‘Wars of the 20th Century and the 20th Century as War’, Telos, 30: 116–126.

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Conclusion Agnes Horvath, Camil Francisc Roman and Gilbert Germain

With this volume, the aim of the editors and the chapter authors was to explore the connections between three terms, subversion, technology and divinisation, and the realities behind them. We notified readers at the outset that this collection had a highly explorative character, and we believe it has lived up to its billing. The book cannot possibly claim to have offered a comprehensive treatise on the manifold aspects of the interconnected set of problems evoked by the three key title words – technology, divinisation and subversion. Still, we are certain that whatever insight we have advanced here is valuable, and that it matters given the vital importance of these themes for the contemporary world order. Concerning subversion, the aim of the volume was not to promote this or another subversive tactic, or undermine or overthrow existing traditions, powers or customs. On the contrary, our intention was to show that unawares we have been living in a culture of subversion, and have unwittingly been participants in a regime of permanent revolution. In the modern world subversion has become the central mode of operation of established institutions, or social practices, including prominently the ‘free market’ but – strikingly – even the state, as John O’Brien illustrated in his analysis of the regulation of alcohol consumption. A main focus of the volume, however, was on technology as a means of subversion. It is taken as axiomatic that almost all persons of decision-­ making stature, not to mention the vast majority of the lay public, perceive technology in a positive light. This volume intended not merely to debunk this as prejudice but to connect technology with the theme of subversion. It argued that technology is inherently subversive, central to the Schumpeterian notion of ‘creative destruction’, and identified with modern capitalism at its core. Moreover, by universalising the technological dynamic, globalisation has seen to it that we all live under the reign of subversion. Arguing about the inherently subversive nature of technology is an ­onerous task. This volume approached this goal by focussing on ­divinisation, an effort to replace the self with the divine. The aim here was to argue that ­ ndertaking but part of a rather obscure technology is not simply a secular u and long-standing effort to establish new versions in life, in line with the divination of the self. While the idea might seem both strange and decisively

188  Agnes Horvath et al. unmodern, it holds an affinity, as noted, with Goethe’s ‘Faust’, the central modern myth, about the invention of inappropriate unfinalisability (the word coined by Bakhtin). This breach into nature, into the solidity of characters, is also closely connected to those important contemporary efforts that connect modern science and technology, and the unreserved glorification of ‘knowledge’, to obscure Hellenistic undercurrents such as alchemy and hermetism (see the works of Frances Yates), or Gnosticism (see Eric Voegelin). These connections between divinisation and technology can help us ­understand the reasons for the current malaise concerning the increasing unreality of the world in which we live, as expressed in diagnoses of nihilism. Something is unreal when it is fake, not genuine, a mere copy, product of imitation or outright mimicry, while nihilism is associated with the experience of emptiness or the void. Technology arguably promotes both as any technological product is the outcome, on the one hand, of a process, or algorithm, which inevitably produces a large number of identical copies. On the other, in order to transform beings into products their integrity must be destroyed by entering them into an empty space where they could be repositioned. The connection between divinisation and technology is even more intimately connected to the nature of the void itself. Here we accentuated the fact that the term ‘void’ has a double meaning supporting each other. One meaning pertains to mere nothingness. The other meaning of void relates to that part of our world which is not filled with tangible objects. This includes the air of our planet but also the interplanetary or interstellar space, which is not simply ‘empty’ in the sense of an absolute void (about this, see the ‘companion volume’ to this book, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality, in the same series), but is filled with particles that typically are invisible to the eye, including waves. While the knowledge of waves is usually attributed to modern science, an awareness of them can be traced back to classical antiquity, and ultimately to the question of the soul. Here we reach the heart of this book, the difficult and troublesome but vital issue to which it owes its origins: how is the advance of technology connected to the undermining, even the eradication, of the soul. Modern science, even modern social science, shies away from such questions, arguing that because the existence of the soul cannot be scientifically proven it does not exist, except in the metaphysical language of outdated philosophy. However, all of us know deeply that we are singular and unique, that we exist as concrete persons, and cannot simply imagine our existence being other than what it is. The claim that such essentialism is a way to limit, even imprison, our freedom and creativity is actually the best means of imprisoning us in artificial and manipulative constructs and to attempt to destroy the indestructible core of our existence and which was classically, and traditionally, called the soul. Thus, in order to approach this crucial matter, we turned to the classics, in particular to Presocratic philosophy.

Conclusion  189 How to remain true to oneself was a Greek concern. While the ancients sought to keep their distance from the gods they revered, we moderns try to emulate the powers commonly ascribed to the gods. The difficulty, of course, is drawing the line between a healthy sense of personhood or ­humanity and the divine pull towards transcendence. This tension refers to the fact that the determination of ‘character’ is connected to how to participate in the life and intellect of others but also in divine inspiration. Aristotle and, even more so, Plato were aware of the dangers and difficulties involved in this issue. In the time-honoured tradition of intellectual inquiry, the editors of this volume have brought together a series of diverse analyses that question the basic presuppositions grounding the modern age from a shared set of thematic concerns. It is the common opinion of the contributors to this book that the cluster of interrelated themes – technology, divinisation, subversion, liminality – that constitute the book’s focus has not to date been given due consideration by those interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the modern condition. Our hope is that the first step towards rectifying this oversight has been taken with the publication of ‘Divinization and Technology’.

Index

Absolute evil (Citati) 167 addiction 148; see also alcohol absorption 10, 17, 19, 26, 55, 59, 64 actors 37, 77, 84, 88, 112, 177–81; see also theatre Adorno, Theodor 40, 51 aestheticisation 36, 46 Agamben, Giorgio 28 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 177–80, 184 alchemic 87, 177, 179, 184; see also technology alchemy see alchemic alcohol 11, 132–40, 143–9, 187; industry 134, 146; policy 145, 147; scapegoating 136 aletheia 58 alienation 5, 34 allegory 74–5, 88, 160 alt-right 96 altruism 134, 137 ambivalence 29, 74, 86 American: capitalism 181; dream 180 amphitheatre 181; see also circus, clowns analogies 28, 126, 151, 156, 179 Anaximenes 5 anomie 138 antagonism 41, 46, 49–50, 105, 122, 145, 177 antagonistic see antagonism Anthropocene 38, 49–50 anthropology 2, 63, 137; cultural 55; political 6, 12, 55, 71 anthropos 53–5, 57–8, 60, 69; see also anthropology antiquity 62, 77, 174, 188 anti-fascism 121; see also Germany, Nazi anti-feminism 10, 93, 96–7, 101, 105; see also feminism Anti-politics 115

Antiquity 62, 77, 123, 174, 188 Antwerp 10, 73, 83–5, 89–90 anxiety 9, 62–3, 68, 141 appetite 18, 28–9 Aquinas, Thomas 28, 160 Arendt, Hannah 49, 129 Argyrou, Vassos 95, 105, 108 Aristotle 6, 14–5, 28–30, 43, 57, 142, 152, 160–3, 182, 189 astrology 25, 30 Athens 129, 169 Augustine (Saint) 62–3, 70, 158, 162 außeralltäglich 175; see also out-of-the-ordinary Austrian economics 183 Bacon, Francis 153, 161 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7–8, 75–6, 83, 135, 174, 180, 188 bankers 83, 85; see also market Barthes, Roland 51 Bateson, Gregory 56, 61, 93, 134; see also schismogenesis Baudelaire, Charles 132, 141–2 Baudrillard, Jean 10, 33–51; duality 36, 40–43, 49–51; event 50; evil 36, 40–51; the good 53, 58, 128, 155; illusion 39, 42–4; Integral Reality 49, 51; object 38, 40, 44; otherness 43; punctum 47, 50–51 beauty 29, 50, 151, 167, 177 belief: ancient 6; collective 156; religious 84; system 125–6 Bellamy, Robert 32 Bible 69, 126 biopower 12, 139, 145 birth 56, 64 bodies 6, 8, 15, 17–18, 20, 24, 27, 58, 65, 74–5; disconnected 5; natural 65 Boland, Tom 4, 88

192 Index Bolsheviks 111; see also Russia borders 18, 24; see also boundaries Borkenau, Franz 3 Bosch 75, 86, 88–9 boundaries 5, 7, 48, 51, 75, 84, 101, 177, 179, 188; markers 178 boundary see boundaries Bourdieu, Pierre 136, 147 bourgeois(ie) 68, 79, 82, 121, 161, 179 Brabant 85 Brownian motion 76 Bruegel, Pieter 10, 73–6, 78, 81, 84–90 Bruges 85, 186 Buddhism 115 buffoon (jester) 77, 80–1 Bujak, Zbigniew 125, 126 Buridan’s ass 183 Burkert 159, 163 Burnet, John 1, 13 Byzantium 81, 89 cacophony 88, 92, 97, 105, 107; see also critique Calasso, Roberto 175 Camillo, Giulio 24–5 Camus, Albert 16–17, 44, 50, 68, 110 capitalism 52, 59, 125, 179, 184; contemporary 69; fairground 181; global 12, 181; industrial 136; modern 177, 187; see also market capitalists 111, 161; see also capitalism Caprarola 24 carnival 73–6, 78–9, 86, 88, 135, 174–5, 181; permanent 177; see also feast Carroll, Lewis 170 Castelli, Enrico 86 Catholic Church 88, 125, 128 cave 20–21, 23, 26, 160; see also Lascaux (cave) centrality 2, 50, 80, 87 centre 25, 76–8, 87, 183 ceremonies 78, 80; masters of 61, 63, 79, 81, 140–1, 180; peyote 141 character(s): ambiguous 86; dysfunctional 41; feminine 20; liminal 174; sacrificial 78, 84; scapegoating 78; subversive 3, 55, 83–4 charisma 3, 71; see also trickster charlatans 177–8 Charles VII 82 Charter 77 118, 126 Christian(ity) 29, 39, 53, 56, 60–4, 66, 68, 113, 126, 162; rituals 125; see also religion(s)

chronotope 76, 180 Cicero, Marcus T. 14, 17, 30 circle: devil’s 22; diabolic 16 circularity 15–7, 22, 93–4 circus: clowns 165, 181 city 85, 88; processions 85 City of God 63, 70, 158, 162; see also Augustine (Saint) civic disobedience 120 civil society 119, 166 civilising process 144–5 civilization 32–3, 155; global 159; technological 43 clowns 165, 167, 180–1; see also buffoon (jester) colonialism 105 Commedia dell’arte 83; see also theatre communism 7, 11, 59, 93, 111–13, 118, 120–1, 125, 128–9 communitas 66–7 Constantinople 80–1 consumerism xiii consumer 12, 32, 144, 156, 158, 169–70, 186; sovereignty 170 consumption 68; alcohol 11, 132, 139, 147; market 154 conversion 110–31; authority 94, 101, 119, 127; existential fact 124; mimetic structure 113 corpses 74–5, 87–8 cosmic order 139, 144; see also cosmos cosmos 5, 25, 35, 53, 134, 152–4, 170, 177 court-jester see buffoon (jester) creative destruction (Schumpeter) 8, 9, 32, 35, 52, 183 critique 10–1, 37, 67, 92–9, 101–7, 178, 184; cacophony 96, 103; feminist 103; postmodern 119; subversion 94, 103 crowd 73–6, 81, 86–8, 181 Crutzen, Paul 49 culture 36, 40, 104–6, 134, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 168–9 customer 169–70, 180 cynicism 94, 99, 181 daemons 75–6 debts 84, 174; see also economy Dee, John 21 Defoe, Daniel 176 democracy: modern 10, 66–7 Democritus 6, 161 derivative self 10, 53–5, 64–6, 68 Descartes, René 62–4

Index  193 devaluation 64 dialogues (Plato) 53, 69, 159 Diderot, Denis 167, 186 discipline 5, 8 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 8, 90; see also discipline disease model 133 disempowerment 4, 54 disenchantment 33–4, 47, 54, 76 dissidence 110, 113, 116, 118, 126 divination 1–3, 8–9, 14, 16–19, 23–4, 26 divine presence 1 divinisation see divinisation and technology divinisation and technology 1–3, 5, 8–9, 12, 14–15, 17–19, 26–7, 187–9 Djilas, Milovan 121 docile bodies 75; see also corpses domination 10, 33, 36, 40, 44–5, 54, 115, 118, 126, 158 Donne, Mark 159 Don Quixote 69 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 7, 12, 166–8 drinking 11, 53, 75, 80, 132, 136–7, 143–4, 146; see also alcohol drug: set and setting 11, 139–40, 142, 145, 147; see also psychoactive substances duality 36, 38, 40–1, 43, 45, 49–51 Durkheim, Émile 2–3, 9, 134–5, 138, 156 dynamism: circular 24; inner 21; nonlinear 22, 24; sterile 16; transitory 22 economics 12, 155–6, 162, 169, 181–2; Austrian 183; neoclassical 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181–3, 185; see also economy economy 12, 145, 175, 181, 186; global 52, 159; modern 12, 173, 175, 181; political 149, 175, 182; see also market Einstein, Albert 24, 27, 30 Eliade, Mircea 18, 53 Elias, Norbert 144 Ellul, Jacques 49 Empire: British 114 enchantment 48, 50; see also disenchantment Enlightenment 11, 54, 95, 98–9, 105, 128, 137–8, 167 entrepreneurs 8, 183 epidemiology 133, 148 error 14, 16, 27, 28, 167 estrangement 73, 76–7, 86, 88

ethic individualism 120 ethnocentricism 105 ethnography 10, 93, 96, 98–100, 102, 109, 149 ethos 10, 29, 34, 40, 55, 57, 66, 84–5, 96 Eucharist 77, 135 eudaimonia 142 Europe 80, 84, 110, 135, 143; late-Renaissance 184; medieval 39 European see Europe everyday life 122, 135, 139, 177 evil 35–7, 40–3, 45–6, 48–51, 86, 113–15, 126–9, 155–6, 167, 183; see also trickster evolution 66, 115, 157, 172 exchange 65, 106, 139, 161, 169, 175, 177, 179; reciprocal 134; stock 173, 179 exchange economy 161, 169 existential fact 124 experience: carnivalesque 177; carnivalesque, see also carnival; foundational 55; liminality 56, 62; political 97; subjective 141; subversion 20, 55; unreality 7 fairground 12, 178–9, 182, 184; charlatan 180; economy 173, 176; permanent 181; see also capitalism fair(s) 173, 174, 175, 185; World 180, 182; see also fairground faith 10, 29, 38, 56–70, 120, 162 Faust (Goethe) 2, 8, 129, 183 feast 77–83, 90, 175; medieval 87; of fools 10, 73, 76, 78–83, 90; religious 83; secular 83 feminism 93, 96, 101–2, 105; see also feminists feminists 10, 96–7, 101, 103–4, 119; see also anti-feminism festival 73, 75, 78–9; drama 78, 85; religious 82; see also feast fiction 99, 152 folly (world of follies) 10, 52, 76–8, 81, 84, 86, 88–91 fool 10, 21, 73, 76–8, 81–4, 86–91; see also folly forgiveness 107, 109 form 4, 10, 16, 20–6, 55–69 Foucault, Michel 3, 5, 8, 46, 50, 75, 77, 88, 93, 105, 108, 138, 170, 183 French Revolution 10, 66–8, 70–1, 166 frenzy 17, 20 furor 17–18; see also frenzy

194 Index Gandhi, Mohandas 114, 116, 118, 120, 122–3, 126 Gell, Alfred 18, 171 Germany 124, 127; Nazi 127–30, 168 gift relations 6–7 Girard, René 7, 67–8, 79, 81, 107, 114, 126, 159, 171 Gnostic(ism) 92, 188 God 63, 67, 69–70, 126, 128–9, 151–2, 155–6, 158, 162; Trinitarian 53 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2, 8, 12, 124, 128, 165–8, 184–5, 188 Gossen, Hermann H. 182, 185 Great Novena 125 Greek: antiquity 123; culture 44, 77; mythology 56 Greene, Robert 176 Greeks 6, 14, 17, 29, 50, 170, 174, 189 Griswold, Wendy 176, 184–5 Grossmann, Vasily 112 grotesque 8, 75 growth 5, 55, 59, 75, 79; economic 158; perpetual 4 Guicciardini, Ludovico 83 Hadot, Pierre 160 Hall, John 179 Hamann, Johann Georg 162 Han, Byung-Chul 44 Havel, Vaclav 11, 112–3, 117–9, 122, 125–6, 128, 130 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 184 Hegel, Georg W.F. 9, 28, 124 Heidegger, Martin 3, 18, 21, 28–9, 33, 49, 54, 57–8, 71, 173 health 11, 103, 132–48; see also addiction heart 12, 57, 184 Hennis, Wilhelm 34, 52, 59, 71 Heraclitus 8 hermaphroditism 87 hermeticism 3 Hesiod xiii Hippocrates 1, 13, 19 Hobbes, Thomas 41, 54, 58, 63, 179 homology (Aristotle) 23 hook (Y sign) 18, 21–2, 24, 26 Horkheimer, Max 40 Horvath, Agnes 51–2, 77–8, 93 Huguenot 182 humanism 85, 111, 119, 144 Hungary 121, 169 Huxley, Aldous 144 hysteresis 19, 21, 29

idolatry 156, 158–9, 161–2 idols 159, 162; see also idolatry imitation 2, 6–7, 12, 15–6, 18, 26, 28, 95, 98, 113–4; laws of (Tarde) 7; see also mimesis indestructible 6, 8, 53, 60, 93, 184 India 114 inertia 27 intensity 22, 25, 100, 175, 183 interest(s) 10, 12, 55, 64, 68, 145, 182 Ion (Plato) 19 Italy 24, 147 Jacobi, Friedrich 168 Jaspers, Karl 127–130 Jesus 56, 60, 115, 126, 155; see also religion(s) Jevons, William S. 181–2 Jew(s) 124, 127, 143 John Paul II, Pope 112, 128–30 Jung, Carl G. 81 Kant, Immanuel 64 Keohane, Kieran 96, 108 Kerényi, Karl 186 Kelly, Kevin 35, 38, 50 Kierkegaard, Søren 7, 159, 171 Kleist, Heinrich von 29 Kołakowski, Leszek 117, 125 Kuroń, Jacek 117 labyrinth 166 language(s) 11, 57, 95, 100–3, 107, 160, 163, 169 Lascaux (cave) 23, 81; see also cave Latour, Bruno 162–3 laughter 80, 83, 177 Laws (Plato) 29, 69 Lefort, Claude 56 Leibniz, Gottfried W. 9 Lenin, Vladimir I. 108, 113–14, 120 Lessing, Gotthold E. 166–7, 184 liberalism 93, 133, 134, 145; see also economics lie: living within a 117, 120, 126; see also truth liminal 3, 7, 11, 52, 54, 56, 63–4, 66, 89, 171; experience 63, 66 liminality 2–3, 5–8, 11–12, 48, 51–2, 55–9, 61–3, 70–2, 168, 170–1; forced 28; permanent 8, 51, 55, 61, 83, 94, 173, 175; ritual 81; temporal 180 liminal situation see liminality

Index  195 liminal stage, permanent 75, 78 limitless xiii, 10, 35, 48, 56, 67–8, 107, 111 linear transformation 30, 170, 172, 175, 180–2 linearity 22 London 176, 182 Louis XVI 67–8, 70–1 Madonna 125 magic 1, 3, 18, 48, 50, 154; image-171; see also alchemy Mandela, Nelson 117 Mann, Thomas 124 Maritain, Jacques 120, 130 market(s) 12, 119, 173, 175; free 134–5, 146, 157, 161, 187; see also fair Marx, Karl 7, 13, 58, 156–7, 161, 163 Marxism 120–1, 125, 156–7 mask(s) 2, 6, 18, 29, 76, 80, 82, 84 mass see crowd masters of ceremony 140–1 matrix 15, 21, 23, 25, 28, 139, 143, 170, 176; perverted liminal 59; technological 40; see also womb matrixing see matrix Maxwell, James C. 19 Mbembe, Achille 184 measure 55, 58, 138 media 96, 99 Mediterranean 11, 143 Meikle, Scott 161 memory 12, 24, 111, 116, 123, 171–2; theatre of 25; see also Memory Theatre (Camillo) Memory Theatre (Camillo) 24 Menger, Carl 181–2 mercenary 15, 23, 28; activities 14; logic 16; motive 15; potential 23 merchants 76, 83, 85–7, 177–80; see also fair Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 38, 51–2 metallurgy 19, 95 metamorphosis 2, 75, 179 metaphysics 12, 29, 37, 66, 90, 110, 153, 161–2; Aristotle 153; medieval 151, 153; modern 153–4, 157 metaxy 60, 150, 151 Michnik, Adam 115, 117, 124, 127 Miłosz, Czeslaw 112, 121 Milton, John 2 mimes 77, 81, 84, 89; see also fairground mimesis 2, 16; see also imitation

mimicry 2–3, 7–8, 10, 14, 18, 188; see also imitation modern(ity) xiii, 6, 33–5, 41, 48, 72, 108, 137, 153–4; critique 94; globalised 51; political 53, 66 money 151–4, 158, 161, 163, 168–9, 177, 182–3, 186; see also economics moral panics 136 Mumford, Lewis 3, 18 Musk, Elon 43, 50 Nazism see Germany, Nazi Newton, Isaac 185 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 7, 56, 92, 114, 119, 159, 168, 171 nihilism 7, 92, 168 nil 14–8, 20, 28; see also zero non-violent ethics 115 nothingness 26, 48, 53, 168, 178, 184 novels 7, 69, 72, 75, 91, 167, 186 On the Soul (Aristotle) 6, 13 ontology 49, 65, 152, 160 opportunity cost 12, 183 order: cosmic 139, 144; everyday 79; holy 77; monastic 178; moral 138; natural 41; social 61, 135; symbolic 45 Ortega y Gasset, José 70, 110–111 Orwell, George 107, 112 Othello (Shakespeare) 170, 178 out-of-the-ordinary 170, 175; see also everyday life outsider 58, 73, 77, 97, 112 Palaeolithic 20; caves 20, 22; see also cave Paradise Lost (Milton) 2 parasite 77, 183; see also outsider participatory ontology 10, 54–6, 59–64, 69 Pascal, Blaise 108, 171, 184 Pasternak, Boris 111, 131 pathology 49, 136–7, 139, 145 Patočka, Jan 173, 185 perpetuum mobile 67 phenomenology 38, 134, 141–2 philosophy 37, 128, 162, 165, 173; ancient 160, 163; Aristotle 153; classical 56, 60, 169; critical 65; modern 10, 55, 58–9, 64 Physics (Aristotle) 6, 14–15, 28, 30 placeholder 15; see also zero Plato 15, 17, 19, 26, 28–9, 53, 56, 69, 151–2, 159–61

196 Index pleasure 143–4, 147–8, 181–2 plotting 12, 165 Poetry and Truth (Goethe) 166–7 Poggi, Gianfranco 131 Poland 115–17, 120, 124–5, 129 Polish Catholicism 125; see also Catholic Church political messianism 120 Popitz, Heinrich 11, 25, 112–13, 116, 121, 131 possession 16–7, 19, 22, 28 posthumanism 50 power 5–7, 9, 15, 22, 24–6, 32, 44–5, 66–7, 112–14, 120; absolute 113; authoritative 15; communist 112–13; instrumental 112, 120, 122, 126; internal 11, 112, 116, 121; military 153; monetary 152, 154; powerless, of the 117, 125; political 9, 71, 117, 154; religious 67; secondary 64, 68; spiritual 125; subversive 33, 36, 112 powerlessness 118–19; see also power of the powerless problematisation(s) 3, 136, 138–9 progress 11, 22, 26, 54, 59, 129, 137–8, 169, 172, 181; technological 9, 49 proletariat 114, 121, 125 proportion 11, 139–40, 142–3, 145 Protagoras xiii Protestant(ism) 64, 135, 153 psychoactive substances 11, 134–6, 139–40, 142, 144, 146–7; see also addiction public: arena 173; health 11, 133, 137, 145, 147–8; sphere 94, 98, 107, 173 Puritanism 103, 105 Puritans 177; see also Puritanism Pythagoras 21, 29 racism 105 Rabelais, François 7, 75, 89, 147, 182, 184 Radin, Paul 95, 109, 168, 186 rational(ity) xiii, 39–40, 42, 65–6, 69, 143, 171, 181, 183; modern 39, 40, 42 reality 36–42, 45–7, 60, 68–9, 111–13, 124–5, 151, 154–6, 162, 170–1; alien 43; embodied 160; false 117; given 171; liminal 56; lived 160; ordinary 154; problematic 39, 45; stealing of 171; unreal 173 reason(ing): Euclidean 39; false 14, 18; see also rational(ity) receptacle 25–6, 28

reciprocity 138 recognition 58, 117, 121, 143 Reddit 96, 99–100, 104 religion(s) 50, 65, 68, 113, 116, 143, 148, 156, 161–2; Abrahamic 158; political 125; see also Christian(ity) Renaissance 77, 82, 88, 110 Republic (Plato) 110 ressentiment 3, 49 retardation 22–3 revenue 136, 144–5 revolutionary 93, 111, 113–14, 120, 173; communism 110, 115; crowds 116; force 32 Ricketts, M.L. 168, 186 ritual 6, 10, 63, 66–7, 81, 84, 125, 134, 144; see also religion rivalry, mimetic 7, 114 (Girard) Robinson Crusoe 176 Rolling Stones 183 Rome 62–3; invasion 62 Rossbach, Stefan 123, 131 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 30, 167 routine 175; see also out-of-the-ordinary Russia 111–12, 130; Bolshevik 111, 120, 168 sacred 10, 22, 39, 54, 67–8, 70–2, 144 Saint Augustine 57–8, 62–4, 69 San Suu Kyi, Aung 117 samoobrona (self-defence) 11, 113 satire 11, 73, 78, 81–2, 84–6, 100 satyagraha 114, 116, 122 scapegoat(ing) 67, 71, 77, 81, 90, 126; see also Girard, René Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 184 scarcity 111, 152; see also market Scheler, Max 3, 30, 49, 52 schism 11, 95, 145 schismogenesis 6, 11, 55–6, 61–2, 66, 93 Schleifer, James T. 13 Schumpeter, Joseph 8, 15, 49, 182–3, 187 Second World War 129, 173 secondary powers 64 secrecy 165, 168 secret society 166; see also secrecy secularisation 78, 81, 86; see also disenchantment self-control 136, 139 self-interest see interest self-limiting revolution 116–117 self-sacrifice 113, 118 sensuals 16, 29

Index  197 Shaft Scene (Lascaux) 81; see also cave Shakespeare, William 167, 170, 176–8 Simmel, Georg 59, 118, 131 Singh Mehta, Uday 122, 131 sleep 20 sleepwalker 15 slingshot 22–3 Smith, Adam 179 Snow, John 137 sociability 136, 139 society: agrarian 111; capitalist 136; consumer 12; economic 180–1; pluralistic 136; subverted 75 Socrates 37, 53, 123, 126, 160; see also Plato solidarity 4, 67, 98, 125; see also Solidarity (Poland) Solidarity (Poland) 4, 67, 98, 115–7, 119, 124–6, 128; see also Poland solutionism 52 Sombart, Werner 27, 31 Sophist (Plato) 26; see also Plato soul 2, 5–8, 11, 27, 53–4, 60–1, 63–4, 110, 112–13, 188; force 114, 118 sovereignty 169; costumer 170 Soviet(s) 112, 116, 120–1, 124, 127 Soviet Union 112–13, 117; see also Soviet(s) spiral 5, 98, 107, 112, 114, 116, 156 spirit drinking cultures 135–6; see also alcohol Stalker (Tarkovsky) 29 stasis 25, 28, 92, 94 state formation 137, 145 stock market 10, 78, 175; see also fairground Stoics 29 subjectivisation of the nation 124 submission 1, 7, 14, 45 substitutability 175 subversion 1–7, 9–12, 16–20, 25–7, 53–7, 92–5, 99–107, 109–14, 122–4, 165; critique and 11, 93–5; doxological 15; historical 106; infinite 92; mimetic 114; modern 55, 59; political anthropology of 1; revolutionary 112; theme 4, 187 subversion and conversion 119, 122, 126 Susman, Warren 180–1 Szakolczai, Arpad 6, 29, 60–2, 69–70, 81, 89 Tabula Smaragdina 165 Tarde, Gabriel 2, 7, 13, 171

technium 35, 36 technology 1–5, 8–10, 12–5, 17–19, 25–7, 31–7, 39–52, 187–9; alchemic 173; alchemic, see also alchemic theatre 80, 88, 166–7, 177–9, 184; rebirth of 91, 184 Thomassen, Bjørn 6, 48, 51, 62–3, 66, 70–1, 77–8 Thucydides 25 Tibet 30 Timaeus (Plato) 28, 69 Tocqueville, Alexis de 4, 13 totalitarianism 112, 129 transcendence 12, 150–1, 189 transcendental 18, 22–3, 64–6 transgression 94; see also transgressive act transgressive act 147 transition: permanent 10; transformative 61; see also liminality transitoriness 16, 27, 56, 61; permanent: 166, 178; see also liminality trauma 19, 140 trickery 2, 28, 168 trickster 11–12, 77, 79, 81, 87–8, 94–5, 108–9, 168, 170–2, 176 Trotsky, Leon 173, 183 Trump, Donald 109 trust 56–7, 138, 162, 179 truth: 10, 11, 37, 38, 39, 63–6, 93–5, 110–6, 118, 121–3, 126–8, 160–1, 184–5; -force 11, 113–14, 118; -game 93; living in 122, 126 Turgenev, Ivan 168 Turner, Victor 78–9, 94, 135 undermining 4, 135–9, 165–8, 178–9 union 6, 15–20, 27, 34 upsilon see hook (Y sign) uterus see womb utilitarianism 135 utility 12, 27, 135, 181–2; marginal 181–2 vacuity 15, 97; see also void Van Gennep, Arnold 2, 61, 78 Varoufakis, Yanis 159, 164 veralltäglich 175; see also routine vibration 19, 21–2, 29 victim(s) 10, 22, 73, 81, 169, 172, 177 Vienna 182 Vietnam 142 violence 79, 105, 112, 114–5, 126, 159, 165; mimetic 115, 126; political 116; revolutionary 67, 113

198 Index virtue see virtuous virtuous 12, 74, 107, 115, 120, 122 Voegelin, Eric 7, 51, 53, 54, 60, 62, 63, 68, 70, 92, 173, 188 void 5–6, 10,15, 53, 55, 59, 64–9, 156–7, 188; see also vacuity Volksgemeinschaft 127, 130 Voltaire 166–7 Walentynowicz, Anna 125 Wałęsa, Lech 117 walk(ing) 13, 25–6, 30, 52, 70–1, 185; see also circular walk Walker, James 32 Wallace, Anthony F. C. 141 Wall Street 150 Walras, Léon 181–2 wars 31, 42, 66, 83, 101–2, 127, 172–3, 175, 185 Washington, George 180 wave, patterns 29 wavelength, electromagnetic 16, 21–2; see also technology

waves: electric 22; electromagnetic 16, 20 Weber, Max 5, 33–4, 52, 54, 59, 115–16, 174–5, 184 Weil, Simone 110 Werther (Goethe) 166–7 Wilhelm Meister (Goethe) 166 Wojtyla, Karol 117; see also John Paul II, Pope womb 15, 19, 25, 28, 161; see also matrix World Health Organisation 132 world upside down 165; see also liminality worldview 32, 35, 40, 43, 49, 134, 138, 143 Wyszyński, Stefan 125 Yates, Frances xiii, 21, 24, 188 Yeats, William B. 183 Yiddish 143; see also Jew(s) zero 17, 27, 44, 68, 93; see also void Žižek, Slavoj 50, 52 Zoroastrian 92; see also religion(s)