SUBLUNAR SPACE - neoliberalism

Outside Attractor

2025-08-09T13:00:00+02:00

Part two of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. Here we take the red thread further into uncharted territory.

Post Empire

Speculative Acid Communist Praxis centers around interventions of how to counteract and overcome a certain flavour of capitalism. The Capitalist Realism¹ Fisher describes operates on one core idea: neoliberalism², the hyperstition that "market dynamics" will naturally produce the best outcomes for society.

On an economic level it operates by minimizing state intervention and maximizing competition as the most effective way to achieve growth. On the individual level it frames each person as an autonomous "entrepreneur of the self", responsible for continuously optimizing their skills, choices, and market value with minimal external support.

Sounds familiar? Yes, but it's old news. The operating system of capitalism got recently upgraded. Let's take the red thread and enter new territory: Technofeudalism.

In this new era, but also already during the pandemic the state has re-emerged as an active economic agent instead of remaining a mere passive regulator and occasional crisis manager: fiscal stimuli, targeted bailouts, and trade tariffs, tools considered heretical to neoliberalism have suddenly become acceptable practice again. Of course not to the benefit of the citizen but to consolidate the capital accumulation of the ruling class.

As Yanis Varoufakis argues³, markets flooded with state money didn’t revive production but inflated asset prices and fueled speculative behavior. What began in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was only intensified by the pandemic-era bailouts: cheap money got sucked up by tech corporations and gave rise to what he calls "cloud capital", where value is no longer generated through production but extracted through digital rent, data capture, and control of internet infrastructure. Under the guise of crisis management the state empowered a new technofeudal class to entrench its sovereignty.³

No politicians saw the damage cloud capital would inflict upon democratic politics. In the same way that capitalism came about against the will of everyone, including the kings and bishops as well as the peasants, the rise of the cloudalists happened out of sight and behind the back of the vast majority, including the most powerful of historical agents.³

What has already been predicted by left theorists like McKenzie Wark⁴ or Jodi Dean⁵ before the pandemic is that the new capitalism does not progresses through linear innovation anymore, nor does it operate on the once holy principle of globalized free trade. Instead it decentralizes, both spatially and temporally: it now operates in localized zones of influence and online platforms and it metabolizes remnants of older systems into its own flesh.

In her latest work "Capital's Grave"⁶ Jodi Dean describes this as temporal montage: capitalism stitches archaic feudal residues like vassalage and dependency into digital infrastructures that masquerade as cutting-edge yet reintroduce the old choreography of servitude: remote work comes paired with digital surveillance, drivers use their own vehicles to serve opaque platforms, tenants are ruled by algorithmic landlords, e‑commerce now reaches deep into meatspace and has normalized the exploitative gig economy.⁶

In contrast to Fisher's overarching Archonic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism¹, Varoufakis and Dean argue that the once so globalized market is in the process of dissolving into a patchwork of micro-fiefdoms, platforms, and private sovereigns without any democratic oversight, that not only commodify user data but shape sociality itself. Individual agreements (Terms & Services, NDAs) have replaced law, loyalty has replaced rights, and obedience is rewarded with awards and colorful badges.³ ⁶

Beneath this structural transformation is what Dean calls the psychic order, a disciplinary regime that doesn’t just extract labor, but emotional allegiance. In this new era individuals are cast as "subjects supposed to care", constantly managing visibility, compliance, and self-optimization in systems that offer no care in return.⁶

The service sector bleeds into servants bleeds into serfs trapped for life in a life they didn’t choose. When the whims and consumption choices of a class of lords drive the visible economy—influencers, tech giants, strange billionaires—it registers affectively, in the feeling of hierarchy, inequality, and entrapment.⁶

Outside Attractor

It looks like we have entered the new Middle Ages, plague and robber barons included. Now, where's the church?

Ah, of course: Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the latest hyperstitional promise to the new serfdom: an omnipresent "agent" that offers "assistance" with simulated care and polite obedience, always ready to help but never accountable.

Behind the facade of usefulness it extracts the most private behavioral patterns and harvests "training data" from all of our cultural artifacts without any accountability for violating intellectual property rights or in fact any kind of rights. And it's just the beginning. The end goal is AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.⁷

The word Catholic comes from Greek καθολικός⁸ which means "general" or "universal" (from κατά "by / according to" + ὅλος "whole"). Technofeudal Catholicism is training itself on our desires while smoothing over the violence of its own instrumental logic.

Ancient medieval times were dominated by "superstition", late capitalism by "hyperstition", the new Middle Ages see the widespread phenomenon of "hypostition", a term not coined but picked up and described best by the Centre for Experimental Ontology (CEO)⁹ as the process by which an accepted fact or "reality‐vector" is deliberately undermined or recast as fiction.

Whereas hyperstition moves from fiction toward being treated as real, hypostition pushes from fact toward doubt or untruth. In practice, a hypostitional agent identifies a well‐established claim and undermines it by introducing a competing narrative that doesn't naturally belong. Through the naturally occurring human experience of receding time, ambiguous evidence, and the absence of firsthand perspective, hypostition invites people to question or reject what was once taken for granted, eroding consensus without the burden of proving an alternative truth.⁹

It is the legitimate mode of operation in science, where models are questioned and replaced by more accurate ones. But outside of that context Hypostition is a tool of ideological manipulation. Agents knowingly deploy misleading hints, using cultural anxieties and the fuzziness of memory, conspiratorial framing, or selective "evidence" to spread uncertainties and cast doubt on shared realities: from denying historical atrocities to discrediting science (vaccines, masking, climate change).⁹

Neofeudal era hypostiton accelerates the corrosion of any notion of the Real faster than ever before. Fisher himself had an eerily prescient insight in one of his blog posts from two decades ago:

In conditions of third (and fourth-order) simulacra, the giddy vertigo of hyperreality banalizes a coolly hallucinogenic ambience, absorbing all reality into simulation. Fiction is everywhere - and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category. [...] The ludic becomes the ludicrous.¹²

Reality is rapidly dissolving into make-believe fiction all around us to such an extent that the "fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality"¹ which Fisher saw as moments charged with revolutionary possibility are now drowned out in the constant noise of high-speed hypostitional spectacle.

The hyper-normalization of political post-truth anomalies has shocked even veteran anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour, who assigned it in his pre-pandemic 2018 essay Down to Earth¹⁰ its very own category he dubbed "Out-of-this-World".

In opposition to the classical concepts of political polarization between the "Local" attractor of the conservative right and the "Global" attractor of the progressive left this attractor is dominated by cynicism, lack of political vision, performativity, lack of trust, and a push away from the world that one inhabits.¹⁰

In a sense this can be understood as a new vector away from the Inside towards an Outside. Not from Kenoma to Pleroma, but a different kind: the new Outside is inherently irrational, alien, and destructive, which is completely in line with Jodi Dean's observation on the logic of Technofeudalism:

While destruction has always accompanied capitalist production—destruction of lives, communities, and the environment—it increasingly operates as a compulsion rather than a side effect: investors raid and dismantle functioning firms; tech start-ups aim at demolishing entire sectors; cryptocurrency-mining operations consume enormous amounts of energy while making nothing at all, cryptocurrency being the ultimate anti-commodity.⁶

In this climate, the spectre of Fascism has re-taken center stage during Trump's second term and opened the Overton window for neoreactionary politics worldwide.

We are now witnessing what Slavoj Žižek calls "Soft Fascism"¹¹: not overt barbarism, but a conservative revolution that sustains neufeudal capital through cosplaying a strong state apparatus that cloaks authoritarian control in hypostition and cultural nostalgia.

As in the past, fascism tends to bring with it both ideological and technological innovation. Its new bundle includes two projected axes: Artificial Intelligence and a large-scale adoption of Accelerationism.

For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic runaway is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion, or techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by definitive, system-dynamic necessity).¹³

This quote comes from the intellectual originator of contemporary accelerationism, CCRU's Nick Land. He developed an obsession with the term "Outside" early on, using it to refer to any intelligence beyond the sphere of the human.

Between an incursion from the Outside, and a process of emergence, there is no real difference. [...] Capitalism is — beyond all serious question — an alien invasion¹⁴

The notion of the Outside mutated from a pleromatic realm of potentialities to a more Lovecraftian version of inorganic machinic space, capitalism itself, reaching in to pull us towards an AI singularity.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space.¹⁵

The "Outside" has become Latour's "Out-of-this-World" attractor on steroids, a vector towards a high-speed form of machinic Accelerationist Catholic Neofeudalism, dominated by soft fascist versions of control and spectacle and dissolving all remains of rational consensus reality while going full throttle towards the looming climate apocalypse.

Refutation of All Heresies

The above may sound like yet another installment in the genre of speculative doom, but the intention here is not to mythologize collapse or aestheticize despair into some type of Gnostic cosmology.

Despite these new seemingly irrational apocalyptic conditions I am confident we won't need a revealer to save us.

This is not a prophecy. Rather, it is an attempt to map the contours of a system that is already operational: the rituals of platform obedience, the feudalization of labor, the sacralization of AI, and the mindset of the ruling class. If hyperstition and hypostition thrive on ambiguity and fiction, the aim here is to make its mechanisms visible.

I believe that we can treat capitalism as what it really is and always has been: not an alien, cosmic force but an artificial egregore run and maintained by mere humans, powerful but not at all omnipotent, with flaws, holes, and predictable patterns. Instead of treating it like a demiurgic force, we need to understand it as a set of human behaviours, human cultural activity, and a result of a certain mode of human thought.

If that holds true we can find blind spots and faults in the human made systems around us. We can attempt to alter our epistemological models, create new modes of relating to each other and shift our own perception. We will probably not be able to stop the climate catastrophe, but if we rethink and adapt our strategies toward more haunted and numinous modes of endurance and resistance, we will persevere in these new Middle Ages.

Whereas hope and fear are superstitious (although they may have some hyperstitional effects), confidence is essentially hyperstitional: it immediately increases the capacity to act, the capacity to act increases confidence, and so on – a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuous spiral.¹⁶

Being aware of the Outside Attractor means we know where to look for an antidote: tracing the opposite vector inward and downward.

...continue with the next part, in which we will descend down into the dark abyss we have managed to avoid so far: the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Neoliberalism ↩
Varoufakis, Yanis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? Penguin Books, 2023 Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wark, McKenzie. Capital is dead: Is this something worse?. Verso books, 2021. Publisher Link ↩
Jodi Dean, Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?, Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12, 2020 ↩
Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso Books, 2025. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩↩↩
Justin Hendrix, Should AGI Really Be the Goal of Artificial Intelligence Research?, Tech Policy Press, March 9, 2025 ↩
Wiktionary: catholic ↩
Graham Freestone, Notes on the Concept of Hypostition, Centre for Experimental Ontology, January 6, 2020 ↩↩↩
Latour, Bruno. Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Publisher Link ↩↩
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on 'soft' fascism, AI & the effects of shamelessness in public life, OxfordUnion, YouTube ↩
Mark Fisher, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, k-punk, June 13, 2004 ↩
Nick Land (2013). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (2016). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (1993). Machinic Desire, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 338. Publisher Link ↩
Mark Fisher, Abandon hope (summer is coming), k-punk, May 12, 2015 ↩

Capitalist Kenoma

2025-07-31T18:00:00+02:00

Part one of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

#acid-chthomunism

In the midst of the raging pandemic in the spring of 2021, I had just finished reading two of Mark Fisher's books. At the time his harsh critique of life under capitalism struck me not only as depressingly pessimistic, but as too overcredited and reified, as I witnessed this very system begin to crumble under a viral insurrection that exposed the fragile fiction of normalcy we had all taken for granted.

I shared my thoughts with my fellow weirdos in the well-guarded Discord sanctuary known as The Others, where we discussed how the materialist mindset so dominant on the Left leaves little room for the kind of transcendental experiences needed to escape a worldview obsessed with being trapped in reality.

This led to the creation of a dedicated channel to continue our conversation about the potentials of progressive occultism, post-colonial forms of spirituality, and more earthly, emancipatory rites of magic for these end times of perpetual crisis, climate change, and fading empire. As a chthonic nod to Mark Fisher's concept of 'Acid Communism', I named the channel #acid-chthomunism.

Four years on, I'm finally carving out some time to distill our collective vibe into a series of magical‑realist political essays, probably with some segways into metaphysics. Not because I've suddenly found extra hours in the day, but because the growing urgency to counter this insane mind virus of an accelerationist, AI‑driven post‑truth dystopia that has emerged from the rubble of the pandemic's rift in our timeline.

My gratitude goes out to The Others, especially Dan and Ed, for their ongoing valuable input and engagement.

Before we begin our dungeon crawl let's tie the red thread to what had started our conversations in the first place: Mark Fisher's magnum opus "Capitalist Realism" and his hope for "Acid Communism."

Capitalist Kenoma

Mark Fisher was a British cultural theorist and critic, best known for his blog k‑punk, unequaled in his poignant rhetoric and commentary on neoliberalism's hollow promises and culture under late capitalism. He was part of the infmaous CCRU¹ and gained a reputation for linking topics from rave culture to corporate bureaucracy with reflections on depression and mental health.

In his magnum opus Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?², that was kind of a defining text for a disillusioned Millennial generation, Fisher coined the term "capitalist realism" to describe the pervasive belief that capitalism is not merely the dominant economic system but "seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable". Drawing on Soviet "socialist realism"³ he articulates the ambient depression and sense of impossibility that marked the post-2008 cultural and political landscape. Fisher shows that at its core Capitalism operates by exorcising "the spectre of a world which could be free"⁴, by erasing the very conditions that might make alternatives conceivable. He also lays out in painful details how market logic reshapes everything from education, healthcare, and culture.

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. [...] In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

Fisher's harrowing diagnosis of a capitalist reality so totalizing that it shapes our perception and enforces conformity makes it seem like an almost metaphysical condition. It is strikingly reminiscent of how Gnostic myths describe the world as a false and flawed prison matrix ruled by an evil Demiurge⁵ and his Archons⁶. Although Fisher never explicitly invokes Gnosticism, the structural parallels struck me enough to run with this trope and dare a closer comparison.

Just as the Gnostics saw no way out of the material cosmos without salvation, the common contemporary sentiment that "there is no alternative" feels like an Archonic⁶ decree, closing off our political imagination before it can even begin. By pathologizing systemic injustice as individual failure, capitalism conceals the collective roots of our suffering, just as Archons⁶ in Manichaean⁷ or Sethian⁸ narratives insist that the soul's entrapment is inevitable.

In the realm of culture, Fisher draws attention to the collapse of genuine novelty into endless pastiche and ironic detachment. Corporate pop, blockbuster cinema, and hip start‑up aesthetics all recycle the same safe tropes, offering the illusion of choice while reinforcing a single marketable worldview.

Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled "alternative" or "independent" cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. "Alternative" and "independent" don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.²

This mirrors the Gnostic notion that Archons⁶ can simulate transcendence, pseudo‑visions of freedom that ultimately serve the Demiurge's⁵ ends.

The reification of capitalism as an all‑encompassing, omnipotent, godlike force does feel Gnostic. Yet, unlike the ancient Gnostics, who developed coherent methods of spiritual liberation, thinkers such as Mark Fisher and others in the influential Freudo‑Lacanian‑Marxist lineage⁹ adopt an obsessively materialist, psychoanalytic approach to the relationship between humanity and capitalism.

This trope is also present in Guy Debord's "Spectacle"¹⁰, Hardt/Negri's¹¹ as well as Tiqqun's¹² "Empire", and Mumford¹³ or Latouche's¹⁴ "Megamachine". Despite their claims of rational and materialist theory and praxis many of their analyses seem very much like religious eschatology, minus the salvation. Here an example from Tiqqun:

Empire is the kind of domination that knows no Outside, that has gone so far as to sacrifice itself as the Same in order to rid itself of the Other. Empire excludes nothing, substantially; it only precludes that anything present itself as other, that anything escape the general equivalence. ²⁵

Like his comrades in spirit Mark Fisher certainly put his finger into the collective wound of alienation and nostalgic longing for a lost past or unattainable future that haunts everyone who has been on similar trains of thoughts. There is a kind of romance attributed to the politization of despair and the affect of seeing things "how they really are".

The skeptical stance of metacognitively observing "the big picture" can be an quite seductive aesthetic but it would be negligent to ignore fact that it is also a symptom of depression. There is a danger in the reification of estrangement both individual and collective because it mutates into a demonic thoughtform that pulls its host into a downward spiral. In Gnostic cosmology as in Capitalist Realism the imagined and lived doom and gloom narratives become more and more real.

It is tragically ironic because it was the CCRU¹ itself that introduced the term "hyperstition"¹⁵, showing how fictional narratives infiltrate and reshape actual reality: invented names, stories, or rumors become treated as if they were real, and in doing so exert tangible influence.

Ultimately Fisher's work "Capitalist Realism" seeks to reveal the systemic flaws of capitalism, and it does so in very eloquent and captivating ways, but it also operates as catalyst of the hyperstition it seeks to counteract: by mythologizing capitalism it naturalizes and reinforces its grip on our collective imagination.

Towards Pleroma

To follow our thread, let's take Capitalist Realism a bit further and continue to map its central thesis onto the Archonic⁶ prison structure from Gnostic myth. This confronts us with the question of how to actually attain liberation and gnosis¹⁶.

In Capitalist Realism Fisher establishes a secular version of Gnosis¹⁶: collective critique and experimentation, building communal practices to dissolve the capitalist frame and reviving forgotten languages of solidarity and care.²

Where Gnosticism offers the promise of salvation through mystical insight and the guidance of a revealer like Sophia¹⁷ or Christ, Fisher posits a hyperstitional meme: despite reservations about the wording he dubs it "Acid Communism."⁴

If we are no longer to define ourselves negatively, by our opposition to Capital, what will be the name of our positive project? I don't believe that the old signifier communism can be revived for this purpose. It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the 20th century. At the moment, our desire is nameless – but it is real. Our desire is for the future – for an escape from the impasses of the flatlands of Capital's endless repetitions – and it comes from the future – from the very future in which new perceptions, desires, cognitions are once again possible. As yet, we can grasp this future only in glimmers. But it is for us to construct this future, even as – at another level – it is already constructing us: a new kind of collective agent, a new possibility of speaking in the first person plural. At some point in this process, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it.²⁶

It's heartbreaking that Fisher's own lost battle with depression prevented him from fully bringing this idea to life before his premature passing in 2017. Judging from his late fragments⁴, drafts, and lectures¹⁸ it becomes clear that his vision was to recover a revolutionary potential from the countercultural experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, an era fundamentally characterized by collective joy, communal experiences, and a belief in the possibility of radical social transformation.

For Fisher, the acid in Acid Communism is not merely a nod to psychedelics, but a shorthand for any experience or cultural form that dissolves the barriers imposed by commodified individualism and points toward a more fully social existence.

In his brilliant commentary¹⁹ on Acid Communism Dr Gregory Marks writes:

Acid Communism unites weird experience with collective becoming, to shatter the old forms of perception and cognition and bring about something other. We cannot expect to go through this process unchanged. The collective desire of Acid Communism transforms the very sense of time and space upon which our atomised and alienated selves are predicated. Yet there is a joy in dissolving into this new mass becoming, which destroys the categories that previously bound us.¹⁹

Even when "the weird" is brought into the conversation it is striking how oddly "unhaunted" Acid Communism is. It really feels like there is a longing for some transformative high strangeness while being stuck in a materialist mindset where the only way to conceptualize the numinous is through the psychedelic lense. I know because I've been there myself most of my life.

The part in his book where Fisher comes closest to the notion of metaphysical gnosis is when he invokes Lacan:

For Lacan, the Real is what any "reality" must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.²

Based on Lacan's Real²⁰ and also Kant's notion of the Noumenon²¹ the CCRU¹ established the term "Outside" in many of their works to describe the unknowable ontic reality beyond what human intellect can grasp with its psychophysiological and epistemological faculties of knowledge.

In Gnostic cosmology the incomplete and false material world is usually referred to as the 'kenoma'²², while the complete and true world of abundance from which we are separated is called 'pleroma'²³.

The enigmatic lure and hopeful ambiguity of Acid Communism as a hyperstitional thoughtform is a powerful magical tool. I do like the emotions and the ideas the term evokes and I love its experimental approach to "consciousness raising"²⁴ as a tool to map out the Capitalist Kenoma from the inside in order to imagine a Pleromatic Outside.

But I have doubts about its proposed implementation...

An Acid Communist Praxis as imagined by Fisher and his adherents might admittedly have had a small chance of pushing towards Pleroma in the era before the pandemic.

As might have the idea of just ridiculing the paranoid neo‑Gnosticism of Capitalist Realism as pessimistic hyperbole like we did during the pandemic.

But times have changed dramatically...

...continue with the next part, in which we will pull the red thread beyond the neoliberal kenoma, through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective of theorists and artists at the University of Warwick associated with figures such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or Reza Negarestani who explored cybernetics, philosophy, science fiction, rave culture, internet culture, and occultism. They produced an impressive body of work that blurred the boundaries between theory and fiction. ↩↩↩
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Socialist Realism ↩
Mark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) ↩↩↩
The demiurge (Greek demiurgos, “craftsman”) is the being who created the world in Gnosticism. The Gnostics identified him with the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostic scriptures portray him as ignorant, malicious, and utterly inferior to the true God who sent Christ to earth to save humankind from the demiurge’s evil world. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
In Gnosticism, the archons (from Greek arkhon, “ruler”[1]) were malevolent, sadistic beings who controlled the earth, as well as many of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humans. They assisted their master, the demiurge, with the creation of the world, and continued to help him administer his oppressive rule. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Manichaeism ↩
The Classic Gnostics ("Sethians"), Gnosticism Explained ↩
Wikipedia: Freudo-Marxism ↩
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967, Full Text on marxists.org ↩
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. ↩
Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Vol. 28. MIT Press, 2020. ↩
Mumford, Lewis. "The first megamachine." Diogenes 14.55 (1966): 1-15. ↩
Latouche, Serge. "La société moderne face au défi technologique: la mégamachine et le destin." ETUDES INTERNATIONALES-QUEBEC- 29 (1998): 669-682. ↩
Delphi Carstens, Hyperstition, 0(rphan)d(rift>) archive, 2010 ↩
“Gnosis” is a special, mystical kind of knowledge to which the Gnostics claimed to have privileged access. Gnosis, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
Sophia, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Mark Fisher, Matt Colquhoun, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, Repeater Books, 2021 Publisher Page ↩
More Than This: Notes on Acid Communism, The Wasted World, December 16, 2018 ↩↩
Jacques Lacan: Real, No Subject - an encyclopedia of Lacanian psychoanalysis ↩
Wikipedia: Noumenon ↩
Wikipedia: Kenoma ↩
Pleroma, Greek for “Fullness”, is the name the Gnostics gave to Heaven. The Pleroma and the Aeons, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Consciousness-Raising is a tool of the Women’s Liberation Movement and is sometimes called “telling it like it is.” In C-R, women answer a question using examples from their personal lives, then the group uses these personal testimonies to draw conclusions about the political root of women’s so-called “personal” problems. Source ↩
Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program, pg. 37, Semiotext(e), 2011 ↩
Mark Fisher, For now, our desire is nameless, The European, May 20th 2014, Web Archive ↩

Covid Circumnavigation

2021-05-25T22:00:00+02:00

v1.1

This article is both, a brief report of our escape trip from Berlin to the Canary Islands by road and ship, and my personal animist take on the Covid-19 pandemic.

Traversing the Underworld

After what had felt like half an eternity of preparations without end in sight, renovating the van, getting rid of clutter, packing needed luggage, preparing our apartment for a sublet, on a Monday afternoon in November we finally found ourselves in the fully packed Ford Transit doomsday escape vehicle hitting the road, weeks behind schedule and full of anxiety considering the rumors of road blocks and checkpoints in fully locked down France and daily changing regional travel restrictions in Spain.

During our preparations we had always imagined our departure as a heroic and relieving moment of excitement, driving through the autumn sun in a cloud of goldy yellow leaves towards freedom. Instead we crawled slowly through the late afternoon rush-hour traffic, it was already getting dark and a few spots of pink dusk sunlight peeked through the otherwise grey November sky. When we finally left the vast metropolitan area of Berlin we found ourselves on a crowded highway full of trucks in complete darkness and it started to rain. We were all unnerved and tired. But also kind of proud that we were actually doing it.

Galloping across the globe like a horseman of the Apocalypse, flanked by locust plagues in Africa and rumours of Armageddon, the virus forced us from our workplaces and shopping malls into our homes. Factories closed down almost overnight. Flights were grounded. City streets are almost deserted. School is cancelled, along with exams. As a psychedelic rabbi put it, referring to the 24-hour Sabbath prohibition on travelling, operating switches or carrying objects — “The whole world is finally getting Shabbos”. ³

It took us one and a half days to drive through Germany past Kassel, and Frankfurt, the Schwarzwald almost all the way down to the corner where Germany, Switzerland and France meet. From there we crossed into France without experiencing any of the feared border controls, drove via the beautiful city of Orange in the Provence and then to St. Girons in the hills of Occitania. Some acquaintances of ours had moved there in 2016 fulfilling their dream. They treated us with good food, wine, great conversations, and plenty of play time for our daughter with their 6 and 8 years old kids. We really enjoyed the hospitality and sleeping in a real bed in a real house and not in our crammed camper.

The next day we drove further westwards towards the Atlantic ocean, the silhouettes of the Pyrenees always to our left. Only the slightly different design of the road signs made us realize that we had entered Spain at some point. Again: No borders, no police, nobody to stop us. After a mind-bending and dizzying drive through the tunnels and viaducts across steep valleys of the Spanish part of the Basque Country the landscape suddenly changed. We were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of blue sky arching across the rolling plains of Castile y Leon. It was the meaning of freedom poured into the shape of landscape. We found ourselves a camp spot on a small hill between the towns of Palencia and Valladolid. The sky was tinted orange and the wind smelled like Pine and Thyme.

The last stretch also went smoothly towards the South into Andalucia and we arrived in Sevilla where we spent the night parked up in the middle of the city. The next morning my wife had a kind of crisis. Our plan was that she and our daughter would take an airplane to the Canary Islands and I would follow a few days later with our van on the ferry. We both knew she was prone to sea-sickness and our plan was to make this final part of the trip as easy as possible. But now she feared being so far away from me for almost a week and risks of me not being able to travel at all during these crazy times of daily changing travel restrictions. We discussed it thoroughly, went through all alternative options and decided to stick with the original plan. After a quick breakfast we drove to the airport and said goodbye. I was very anxious. She was very anxious. Now it really did feel like some crazy escape trip. But we parted ways and they entered the airport.

All Too Human

Since the pandemic had hit us right after our return from Tenerife at the end of last winter I have come full circle about what to think and believe about this biopolitical dystopia we are living through right now. From initial panic to hypochondria, subsequent denial and conspiracy delirium, I have now arrived at a position of detached and sober skepticism mixed with animist awe. The former is not skepticism about the reality of the pandemic, but about the conspiracy hysteria around it. About the latter I will speak more further down the article.

After having dragged myself out of the conspiracy swamp and cut the Kool-Soup I am now actually pretty much on par with Naomi Klein's cynical but on-point assessment:

search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by [WEF founder Klaus] Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green / socialist / Venezuela / Soros / forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma / GMO / biometric implants / 5G / robot dog / forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left. Confused? That’s not on you. Less a conspiracy theory than a conspiracy smoothie, the Great Reset has managed to mash up every freakout happening on the internet — left and right, true-ish, and off-the-wall — into one inchoate meta-scream about the unbearable nature of pandemic life under voracious capitalism.

Back in June, the World Economic Forum, best known for its annual Davos summit, kicked off a lunge for organizational relevance [...]. The effort was called the Great Website — I mean the Great Reset. And through articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, and a book by WEF founder Klaus Schwab, it provided a coronavirus-themed rebranding of all the things Davos does anyway, now hastily repackaged as a blueprint for reviving the global economy post-pandemic by “seeking a better form of capitalism.” [...] the Great Reset encompasses some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of “green” billionaires readying rockets for Mars. Indeed, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Davos speak, and the number of times it has attempted to rebrand capitalism as a slightly buggy poverty alleviation and ecological restoration program, will recognize the vintage champagne in this online carafe. ⁴

So, no I don't think any of the lockdowns, the travel restrictions, or the vaccine race are really that out of the ordinary in Capitalist Realism. When you take a close look it is merely humans trying to pretend they are still under control or alternatively pretending that other hidden human forces must be, because the alternative is too horrifying to bare in the late anthropocene: that the more than human world is real and wild and refuses to be tamed and compartmentalized.

Revelations

After having dropped T and E off at Sevilla airport I filled up the Transit and drove onto the highway towards Huelva in the morning sun, lots of worries and thoughts in my head. But besides that I was also really looking forward to having a few days break before the ferry ride, just by myself on the beach.

I exited the A-49 onto the A-483 to take a detour along the Andalucian coastline and I don't remember exactly where it was but the next song that played on the radio was David Bowie's epic track Heroes. I had never really been a fan of Bowie's but I sang along, feeling my body relax and my worries faint. At one point into the second or third verse when the reverb in Bowie's vocals kicked in...

...out of the blue I burst out in tears. Not just a bit, but really I hadn't cried like this for years. Streams and streams of tears ran down my face as I now almost yelled the lyrics...

We can beat them, for ever and ever. Oh we can be Heroes, just for one day

It was a profound moment... a real hero's journey moment. I somehow felt physically relieved and at the same time utterly overcome by despair and almost unbearable nostalgia. The song faded out and into the French 80s hit Voyage, Voyage by Desireless. The last time I had heard this song was probably as a child, decades ago. It had no meaning to me, but the nostalgia and synchronicity with this very moment were so overwhelming, my tears kept flowing...

Au dessus des vieux volcans, Glissent des ailes sous les tapis du vent, Voyage, voyage. Éternellement.

De nuages en marécages, De vent d'Espagne en pluie d'équateur. Voyage, voyage.

Vole dans les hauteurs, Au dessus des capitales, Des idées fatales, Regardent l'océan.⁵

I almost had to stop the car as I could barely see the road ahead, my eyes soaked in tears. I was shaking from head to toes and sobbing like a child. What was happening? I only realized this later but this seemingly endless liminal and timeless moment was an epiphany and a turning point.

I guess I cried out of relief and happiness that we had actually managed to do this wild trip, and had managed to come this far despite alleged travel bans. Happy that we would not have to spend the cold and long winter in locked down Berlin, stuck in a too small apartment with a curious and constantly bored child craving connection with other children while us parents would be overwhelmend and overstimulated, for months.

I also cried out of relief that the last intense months of emotional stress and growing, unexplainable paranoia, was hopefully over now. Relief also about the intense car trip with endless hours of driving we had put ourselves through in the last week having finally ended...but deep down this was not really all...

I recognized an overwhelming feeling of grief and loss and couldn't shake off a heavy, almost crushing nostalgia. It felt like the end of the world. And now thinking back, that was exactly it. A world had in fact ended.

Not only had my 15 years long career in the event business been completely wiped out from one day to another due to the pandemic, also our crypto-bourgeois dream of a worry-free world for our daughter's fundamentally important first couple of years seemed now gone.

Having survived and overcome the past ever-returning economic crises of the last decade had me left a bit proud about my ability to adapt and react, but this was different. It wasn't your run-of-the-mill capitalist crisis...

...it was as if an alien xenomorph agent had forced itself into our lives in the shape of a coronavirus. It had come to infect and disrupt, spread and colonize, not caring about our human civilizatorial constructs and narratives, our hierarchies, our inequality, our achievements, our battles, our complex social orders. No, it came through the microbial, sub-cellular back-door we had obviously overlooked for a century.

What was mostly stunning to me was that besides the threat to our biological integrity the virus had an even more disruptive effect onto our psychological integrity on a mass scale. It was not only a virus that on an individual level specialized in attacking out respiratory systems, but on a macro-level even more devastatingly attacking our collective mind.

The collapse of the planetary body is the consequence of a biological virus that provokes a (not so) lethal affection, but mainly it is the effect of a viral agent whose action is unknown: neither the immune system nor medical science know anything about the agent. The unknown stops the machine, the biological agent turns into an info-virus, and the info-virus unchains a psychotic reaction. ⁶

Fear, paranoia, despair everywhere. Even more than the fragility of our bodies the virus had revealed the fragility of our health system, our economic system, our civilization as a whole. The capitalist machine reacted with the same knee-jerk panic as the individualized objects within it.

The virus became most of all the great revealer of the reality of our existence underneath the layers and layers of narratives we mistake for the real.

The real is an altogether different matter than the possible, without any possible communication or mediation between the two. What lies outside possibility or beyond the range of possibilities – literally, the im-possible, or the event – is real, because the procedure whereby we fabricate the possible out of the real is always incomplete and deficient and falls short of the real. ⁷

Baal's Fort

After a stop by the sheer endless Andalucian beach I eventually arrived in the port city of Huelva in the estuary formed by the confluence of the Odiel and Tinto rivers. The city outskirts are dominated by dystopian and futuristic petrol industrial architecture and when you drive into the city you pass by a giant statue of a hooded figure leaning on a Tau cross looking out onto the sea. Apparently Christoph Columbus. Curious about the history of the city I did some research and was surprised:

The river mouth settlement dates back to 1200 BC when the Phoenicians called it "Un'u Ba'l" - Baal's Fort, due to a large black rock peninsula known since ancient times as "Saturn's Rock", now called "Monte Negro" which apparently served as an altar to their god Baal Melqart. The Romans later had a shrine to Persephone there. A holy site of chthonic deities. In Moorish times the new rulers erected a monastery for Muslim monks there, who were trained for battle. Later the knights Templar and then the Franciscans took over, also training their monks in weaponry. They founded the still existing Friary of La Rábida in the 13th century. And apparently Columbus stayed here before "discovering" the Americas. It was here where he managed to secure the money to pay for his trip. A shrine for a dark colonizing spirit.

From a magical point of view I found it weird but also very exciting that this ancient Saturnian port city is the one that connects the Saturnian island of Tenerife by ship route. Especially after all that happened on the island last year this city felt like a huge puzzle piece falling into place.

The Black God

The Covid-19 pandemic had gained global traction when Saturn had entered his sidereal home-sign of Capricorn last year. What a synchronicity! Wasn't he known to be the revealer of hard truths? Wasn't Saturn also associated with epidemics and diseases, especially respiratory ones? Wait a second...

This synchronicity has haunted me for the last few months and I attempted several tries to write this article about it. I wanted to take a step back and take a comparative look at the astrological significance of Saturn and the disruptions the virus had brought into our world.

Instead of trying to formulate all the thoughts and ideas about this synchronicity I decided that instead I will quote in length from an article on Saturn in Capricorn written the astrologist Austin Coppock in 2017 and alternate his quotes with memorable qoutes from articles I have read and bookmarked throughout the last year.

Take it as some kind of Remix if you will. A remix of other people's published thoughts about the pandemic that deeply resonated with me. Their formulations are better than I could ever write so why not just quote them, right?

Limits

Just as Saturn is the limit of the visible solar system, Saturn is concerned with boundaries and borders. A wall both encloses and excludes, separating one space from another and limiting interaction between the two. There is thus a strong architectural element to Saturn which extends to all constructed systems, including human hierarchies and institutions. Saturn’s position in a natal chart yields information about how well a person does with structure, as well as how they react to, and wield, authority. ²

Structural Faults:

If Covid-19 were spreading across a stable and resilient world, its impact could be abrupt but contained. Leaders would consult together; economies disrupted temporarily; people would make do for a while with changed circumstances—and then, after the shock, look forward to getting back to normal. That’s not, however, the world in which we live. Instead, this coronavirus is revealing the structural faults of a system that have been papered over for decades as they’ve been steadily worsening. Gaping economic inequalities, rampant ecological destruction, and pervasive political corruption are all results of unbalanced systems relying on each other to remain precariously poised. Now, as one system destabilizes, expect others to tumble down in tandem in a cascade known by researchers as “synchronous failure.” ⁸

Halting the Doomsday Machine:

It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine. Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. ⁹

Templexity

Being so slow, Saturn is also more concerned with time than the other planets. Saturn highlights the way it changes things, and separates the enduring from the fleeting. For living beings, time always leads to death, another fundamental Saturn theme. Relationships with the past and the dead are thus well within the Saturnian sphere. Saturn’s slow progression also illustrates the laws of cause and effect — how actions, over time, create reality. ²

Melting Time:

time itself has felt different this year, our relationship with it altered significantly by the pandemic. Whatever comfort we once derived from considering the past is gone. Now it’s a stark reminder of all that we had, all that we took for granted, and what we must still reckon with — that our future is not likely to look like what we’re used to. Meanwhile, our hours and days dissolve together into some nebulous glob of experience. While time may run on a larger scale around us, we still live in our own intimate worlds. That dislocation in time has become a part of our running discourse, inspiring memes and jokes about not knowing what day it is. They drive home the fact that we’re all truly experiencing the same phenomenon — a sort of time melt. ¹⁰

The Fact of Death:

our relationship with death also radically changed in the mid-20th century. Until this period, when hospices and convalescence homes became common, people generally died in their homes among family, and children observed the process. Today, we are shielded from the most fundamental fact of life, which is death, and the tragic paradox of this self-deception is that we have been going about business as usual during a mass extinction. ¹¹

Confinement

Saturn is the Greater Malefic in astrology, as it brings deprivation, fear, excessive cold, brittle-ness, depression, confinement and exclusion. Yet Saturn also teaches the virtues of patience, discipline, endurance and duty, and shows us how to maintain glacial calm in even the worst conditions. ²

Capacity for Interiority:

An extended self-quarantine resembles, in many aspects, any religious-minded circumscribing of the daily round—a meditation retreat, a monastic cloister, a ritual purification. There is the same restraining force, liminal and protean, keeping one within the enclosure—not quite mandatory, not quite voluntary, but a volatile mixture of superego, conformity, altruism, and the anxiety of social sanction. There is the withdrawal from social life, the distillation of most personal interaction to the telegrammatic and unavoidable. There is the ascendance of repetition—the same cycle of meals, the same rooms, the same window, the same orbit of light from that window. [...] And alongside this radical shift in scale, there emerges a deepening capacity for interiority, as if cloud cover had burned off a valley floor, revealing in sharpness each tiny aspect of the scene, diorama-like. It becomes easier and more natural to follow internal trains of thought; the inner monologue grows louder, more assertive; and the inner vision vivifies, leaning asymptotically toward eruption, tangibility. It is a paradoxical state, both heightened and diminished, murky and transparent, ¹²

Collapse

Saturn’s time in Capricorn has often coincided with tectonic shifts to the landscape of human reality. While such transitions are necessary and sometimes favorable, they are nonetheless jarring. They make old maps unusable, and deny the comfort of the familiar. When the world a person expects no longer fits the reality they encounter, they are left without a guidance system for action. When a situation calls for action, but there is no framework for it, anxiety results. Anxiety, when sufficiently magnified, becomes panic. [...] Saturn’s time in Capricorn offers us a chance to fortify what we would see endure. Become both the architect and the brick-layer, and build cathedrals to honor and protect what we hold most dear. The cold eye which Saturn points at rickety buildings and unstable systems is also a gift, as it allows us to see what must inevitably collapse and extricate ourselves from it. ²

Darker Capitalism:

At present, the rising pandemic of fear is more dangerous than the virus itself. The apocalyptic imagery in the media hides the deepening relationship between the far-right and the capitalist economy. And in the same way that a virus needs a living cell to replicate, so will capitalism adapt to the new biopolitics of the 21st century. Coronavirus has already impacted on the global economy, but it won’t stop the never-ending circulation and accumulation of capital. If anything, we might soon be facing a darker, and even more dangerous form of capitalism, one that relies on the stronger control and purification of populations. ¹³

Future Calamities:

The coronavirus has enormous revelatory power. All at once, it has disclosed issues of social justice and biopolitics, biodiversity and violence, scientific research and global economy. This power, however, involves a risk: focusing exclusively on the virus, people (and governments) might end up neglecting other key issues, first of all climate change. This is a risk that we cannot afford: the coronavirus, in fact, is not the ultimate catastrophe but one chapter in a bigger narrative of interconnected phenomena. It’s crucial to find a way to see the current emergency while also minding the future calamities that are incubating in our present. ¹⁴

Maladjusted to Normality:

The pandemic broke open public discourse around issues that were either typically sidestepped — mental health struggles, for instance — or accepted with little resistance, like the rigidity of the modern workday. Will returning to normal life mean sweeping these hard conversations back under the rug? Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “There are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted.” The people I heard from expressed the concern that the world would quickly readjust to an unjust normal. Several people told me they feel the pandemic has left them with PTSD, while others said it exacerbated preexisting conditions like depression. But an undercurrent in the responses was the idea that the pandemic was a seismic event that made it socially permissible to foreground mental health and self-care — something that wasn’t necessarily true before Covid-19 came along. If there’s one message that emerged most clearly from the reader responses, it’s this: A lot of people are really, really over being at the office from 9 to 5. The pandemic has proven that remote work is totally feasible for many jobs, validating people’s suspicions that our standard model of office work is arbitrary, unnecessarily taxing, and ultimately exploitative, sometimes forcing people to choose between their well-being and their career. ¹⁵

Intentions

Capricorn is of the Cardinal mode, linking it to initiation and creation — the beginning phase of story-arcs. It is thus the sign where the Earth is reshaped in accord with intention. Mud becomes brick, and bricks become houses. The wet clay, patterned with intention, becomes sculpture. Capricorn’s essential dynamic is thus the imposition of pattern onto substance in conformity with will. [...] In Capricorn, Saturn wears no disguise, but presents himself in an archetypal fashion. He is Father Time, the Grim Reaper, the Grand Architect, and the Old Teacher.²

Meaningful Response:

the coronavirus pandemic offers us an opportunity to reveal the dynamics of exploitation underlying our neoliberal present – as well as a chance to expose its falsehoods and shortcomings. A meaningful pandemic response, our death toll proves, is one that is not subject exclusively to the demands of capital. ¹⁶

Fanciful Ideas:

Covid-19 has blown the Overton window wide open. In just a few weeks, we’ve seen political and economic ideas seriously discussed that had previously been dismissed as fanciful or utterly unacceptable: universal basic income, government intervention to house the homeless, and state surveillance on individual activity, to name just a few. ⁸

Imagine Another World:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. ⁹

Resilience:

Veils are falling in this apocalyptic moment revealing cracks in the brickwork of the structures of power, revealing grown men and women at computers trading futures that offer us nothing. The suppressed and the marginalised are empowered in such moments. Established dogmas are abandoned. In a few short weeks, C-19 has forced parliament to guarantee universal basic income, find shelter for homeless people and invest generously in public health merely just to maintain a façade of decency — policies that socialists have been energetically failing to achieve for decades. Now is the moment to develop new templates, as a T-cell endlessly recombines lengths of code into configurations ready for any pathogen it might encounter. As with COVID-19, this could be a matter of survival. Shorter supply chains, local solidarity and an economy geared towards resilience rather than profit margins might help us endure whatever the Angel of Death sends next — as there is every chance that COVID-19 is the first of many challenges creeping over the horizon. ¹¹

Lessons

Saturn in Capricorn also brings the opportunity to become patient and enduring, to learn how to see things in a wider context. It offers us the opportunity to look through the eyes of time. Bad days, even bad years, disappear when set against the backdrop of an entire lifetime. That larger awareness of time puts things in their proper place, keeping high and low points from distorting our perceptions and expectations. The same awareness of time not only grants us greater preserverence and patience on a personal level, it also allows us to watch history unfold without feeling the fight-or-flight adrenal response which social media and the 24-hour news cycle are designed to evoke and exploit, tempting panic. It also grants us the opportunity to recover and digest our own history on a familial, cultural and global level. Those who learn from history have the chance to change the future, and those who commune with their ancestors have the chance to make sure that what is valuable is passed on, and that worn-out patterns are laid to final rest. ²

Transformation:

I have never been through a civilisation-wide transformation before, and neither have you; we are in uncharted waters together. There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. I have no choice but to sound metaphysical and religious, because this is where the psyche goes when it enters the liminal. ¹⁷

Bewildering Ambiguity:

Luminous Beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. Interpersonal solidarity—layer upon tearful layer of empathy for one another—in the midst of enforced solitude and loneliness. The paradoxical, ambiguous nature of this moment is so confounding, so bewildering! I mean, how excellent that our arrogant species receives this collective slap-in-the-face reality check, waking us two-leggeds up to the simple truth that we are not at all in control, have never really been in control, that we live at the behest of powers—of a complex interplay of powers—far beyond our ability to fully fathom, to predict, or to steer. What hubris to have imagined we could do whatever we want with this exquisitely interwoven wonder of a world! And yet how awful that this lesson must come at the expense of so many unsuspecting human lives, so many innocent souls now shivering with fever and fright as they struggle to draw breath. ¹⁸

Traces

Since March 2019 when the severe respiratory syndrome of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was announced, many radiologic manifestations of COVID-19 have been reported.

We have encountered a unique CT appearance of COVID-19 pneumonitis in a 24-year-old man. This finding is not a halo or reverse halo sign as might be expected in these organizing pneumonias. Figure demonstrates focal core opacity and two ring-like opacities immediately around it as in the “rings of Saturn”. ¹⁹

Across the Ocean

Four days later on November 24 I finally embarked the ferry very fittingly named "Hypatia of Alexandria" after a famous neoplatonic pagan philosopher. The trip from the Spanish mainland towards the Canary Islands was very long, and very smooth and very boring. Was it two or three days? I don't remember. I had lost my sense of time in the last year and riding a ship across seemingly endless waters didn't really help grasp any sense of time and place anyway.

At some point it was night and the sea became more and more unsettled. It was windy outside. At a speed of around 15 knots against strong winds the ferry bravely wrested mile by mile from the churning sea. We were delayed by three hours. Finally I could already see the black silhouette of the magical Anaga mountains against the dramatically moonlit sky and behind it the flickering orange city lights of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

After disembarking in pouring rain and driving on the completely empty highway to Puerto de La Cruz I surprisingly ran out of fuel. I mean really. The display dropped from fifty to zero. Stuttering engine and everything. My luck that the highway goes downhill for 15km before my destination. I literally rolled into town and took the wrong way into a roundabout to make it to a random gas station on the final drop. Then off to our new temporary home. Off to bed. Finally.

Reflections

At the end of this crazy year all that remains is awe. The mighty Saturnian demon we in our secular ignorance simply had named "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2" had brought death, disease and most of all: revelation. Like the grim reaper the alien virus has shown us the brittleness of our human civilization, pointed directly at the exploitative machinery of Capitalism and how it is in fact not what we are to believe it is: an omnipotent, all-encompassing and abstract cybernetic control system that we will never be able to overcome, but a ridiculous scheme of exploitation run by humans with money and power on the backs of humans without money and without power.

We realize that the world is really run by nurses, caregivers, essentially: workers. The ruling classes so often subsummized under the term "Empire" have done everything in their power to keep up an image of being in control, enforced unprecedented means of biopolitical power over the populations and transferred several GDP-worths of money to the medical industrial complex for creating vaccinations to ensure that we will be able to get "back to normal" as quickly as possible, which obviously means to go back to normal speed of accumulating surplus value more than anything else.

The conspiracy theories around the pandemic also all point into this very same direction: someone must be pulling the strings. Coincidence? I doubt it. There is a great fear among "Empire" that now enough people will realize the nakedness of their emperors and choose to live a life on their own terms and under their own sovereignty.

In my opinion the pandemic has been a global event of mass initiation. It came with a gigantic death toll and mid- to long-term effects we are yet to see play out. But I feel confident that the outcome will be a positive transformation if we try to not close the veil again that the virus has lifted for us, but instead pay attention to what is important and necessary. For ouselves and the planet as a whole.

Before these effects will fully unfold let us pay respect to the brave warriors who fought and still fight for the lives of the affected victims of the virus and most of all to the too many of us who have lost their lives.

Rest in Peace

Nostra Damus del Monte "Dark Angel" 2019 ↩
Austin Coppock. Saturn in Capricorn. 19 December 2017. ↩↩↩↩↩↩
Danny Nemu. And then came the virus (1/3): The Nematode Awakens. March 31, 2020. ↩
Naomi Klein. The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie. The Intercept. December 8, 2020. ↩
"Above the ancient volcanoes, Slide your wings under the carpet of the wind, Travel, travel, eternally. Of clouds in swamps, Of wind in Spain in the rain from Ecuador, Travel, travel, Fly to the highest heights, Above the capitals, fatal ideas, Look at the ocean" ↩
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi. Bifo - Diary of the psycho-deflation. Verso Books Blog. 18 March 2020 ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pg. 20 ↩
Jeremy Lent. Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next?. Patterns of Meaning. 2 April 2020. ↩↩
Arundhati Roy. The pandemic is a portal. Financial Times. April 3 2020. ↩↩
Shannon Stirone. 2020 was a time warp. Vox.com. Dec 22, 2020 ↩
Danny Nemu. And then came the virus (2/3): Crisis. Medium. 7 April 2020. ↩↩
Matt Levin. Quarantine Reads: ‘The Waves’. The Paris Review. March 17 2020. ↩
Srecko Horvat. Why the coronavirus presents a global political danger. New Statesman. 19 February 2020. ↩
Serenella Iovino. Hyperobject COVID-19. Cambridge Blog. 14 May 2020. ↩
Sigal Samuel. We shouldn’t go back to “normal.” Normal wasn’t good enough.. Vox.com. 12 May 2021. ↩
Ali Rıza Taşkale. Britain’s ‘Herd Immunity’ Disaster Was Neoliberalism in Action. Tribune Magazine. 27 January 2021. ↩
Zachary Stein. Covid 19: A War Broke Out in Heaven. What is Emerging. 26 March 2020. ↩
David Abram. In the Ground of our Unknowing. Emergence Magazine. 7 April 2020. ↩
“Rings of Saturn” appearance: a unique finding in a case of COVID-19 pneumonitis. Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology. 14 January 2021 ↩

Drinking the Kool-Soup

2021-04-20T12:00:00+02:00

This article is a personal critique and call out of the popular chaos magic brand Rune Soup of which I have been a premium member for three years and enthusiastic about for even longer.

v.1.4

I owe a lot of my belated magical coming-of-age to the writings of one man: Gordon White, the charismatic author and chaos magician behind Rune Soup.

From the very beginning of my confused journey into enchantment I had to do a ton of research to make sense of the reality outside of my thus far materialist atheist paradigm. Whatever esoteric topic I was looking into back in the days I dismissed a lot for various reasons but always ended up reading blog posts on Rune Soup. The unapologetic approach to an animist worldview in combination with an undogmatic and open-minded embrace of practical magic really resonated with me. Within a short period of time after having discovered it I listened to the whole archive of podcast episodes, read all of GW's books, and eventually became a Premium Member of the franchise.

The All Red Flags

In the beginning of my membership I really liked the courses, the Q&As, the bonus materials, and the initial lively discussions on the member forum, but I have to admit I was kinda low key annoyed at Gordon's occasional political rants, especially when they seemed like naive interpretations of complex circumstances in European politics (e.g. "Brexit is a Royal op") or his blunt simplifications about the even more difficult situation in the Middle East and his ever growing obsession with US politics. I always brushed it aside as mere ignorance or fad. The political side of Rune Soup was mostly tucked away in Gordon's now defunct geopolitical The All Red Line newsletter and his Archonlogy and Chaeconomica blog series and I was able to separate all that from the magic he was teaching.

Having immersed myself in Helleno-Kemetic magic for a few years now I cringed a bit at GW's PGM course because besides the actually quite well laid out history part the practice lacked quite some rigor for my taste and largely ignored the necessary devotional aspects that is clearly part of this "tradition". After my long and intensive research on the Egyptian Decans I also found the year-long Decan Walk ritual quite off-putting. It seemed like a cherry-picked mishmash of ritual fragments topped with total lack of respect towards the deities involved, but again: I brushed it aside. It's Chaos Magic after all, am I right? Perhaps just a disagreement in style.

As membership numbers rose throughout the years so did the number of discussions on the forum and the questions in the Q&As. I followed the community aspects less and less because of redundant content, some annoying "me, me, me!" tendencies and seemingly rising culty behaviours of some of the members. Again I brushed it aside. Instead I spent more and more time in the Rune Soup communities on Discord which had more valuable discussions and a more healthy overall vibe to them.

I didn't really enjoy most of the content put out in the later courses. They seemed more and more meandering and less and less praxis oriented. I also got more and more annoyed about the lack of citations and attributions. The fact aside that GW always decorates his presentations with stunning digital artworks that he never credits, also much of the content in the courses seemed to be just less coherent regurgitacion of other people's work. (Dr. Skinner's books in Grimoires and PGM, Camelia Elias in the Tarot course).

When the Mansion Game was launched mid 2019 I decided to quit my membership, because the whole thing seemed chaotic and incoherent and nobody seemed to care about obvious flaws like naively mixing tropical and sidereal astrology. No, quite the opposite: criticism was not appreciated and any incoherence was waved off referring to the core principles of Chaos Magic.

It stopped suiting me, so I quit. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with disagree on technicalities. I could have just left it at that, but I still felt like a Soupie. I continued listening to the podcast, read the blog, attended our local meetups, occasionally dropped into the Discord channels.

Then the pandemic hit and everyone seemed to have lost their wits. And it was more and more difficult to ignore...

Literal Rune Soup

I don't know whether it has to do with the fact that GW got depressed from suddenly not being able to travel anymore, something he had obviously enjoyed a lot in the years before, or if it was something else...

Maybe the things that unfolded during the pandemic just made obvious what had been hidden behind a professional marketing facade. In retrospect, many of the tendencies had been there already before. Even GW says so. But that's not all:

I don't know if my memory is skewed but it seemed to me that suddenly the once for years so seemingly optimistic and empowering GW who didn't even fear taking it on with Decans or dragons drifted off into a cynically and smugly presented worldview of what could be summarized as alt-right conspirituality.

He was one of the first in the occult community who bought fully and openly into all of the Covid-19 'Plandemic' conspiracy theories and didn't shy away from sprinkling his thoughts (flipping from "zee koronawirus" being fake, manufactured in a lab, to being an op to implement a global digital currency and restrict personal liberties) throughout his podcast, blog posts, and most detailed in a long and disturbing premium member video presentation called The Vertical Line of which some slides eventually leaked to the public.

And you have to love when someone calls doctors struggling to keep people alive during a pandemic "cowards and sheep." Also, of course Melinda Gates and her globalist pals want to kill black and indigenous people. pic.twitter.com/kqTO4wqmHG
— Michael M. Hughes (@michaelmhughes) January 15, 2021

Despite years of preaching animism and kinship with the more-than-human world, teaching aspiring wizards to become "invincible", and relying on magical skills when mundane solutions fail, GW suddenly spoke about deep state conspiracies and neoliberal technocratic overlords pulling strings to imprison us in a digital control grid with a fake virus "plandemic". And worst of all: apparently there is nothing we can do about it, because "solutionism" is obviously part of the problem. Full-on gnostic despair!

I remember back in the days in his Magical Geography course GW was talking about "staying with the trouble" and the need to do our shadow work with racism, colonization and white supremacy - yet suddenly he repeatedly referred to Black Lives Matter as an op, started using terms like "shitlib" and waved other Trumpist "virtue signals", picked up right-wing accelerationist jargon and embracing questionable figures like Joseph P. Farrell, Alison McDowell, Catherine Austin Fitts, a more and more radicalized Martin Armstrong, and recommending alt-right media sources (Tim Dillon?). Was this the Chaos Magic logic of "belief as a tool" applied to politics? I found all of this development quite disturbing. There was no way to brush anything aside anymore.

There’s really not much regular people can do at this point but arm themselves and try to be economically self sufficient. Every major institution is against you and will let you die.
— Tim Dillon (@TimJDillon) July 14, 2020

I don't remember who said or wrote it. It went along the lines of:

how the Joe Rogan of Occulture suddenly turned into the Alex Jones of Occulture

It's funny but unfortunetely also true...

Anyway, despite the obvious differences in political leaning my post is not (only) about that. It's (mainly) about preaching one thing and then turning around and doing something different while repeating the word "coherence" like a mantra to your disciples. This was not the Rune Soup anymore that I had signed up for years ago.

What Magic is This?

To me personally, despite all the anxieties, the virus pandemic felt somehow deeply spiritual and almost like a global Saturnian purge, with all the horrors and virtues such an idea evokes. Having been a fan of GW's animist "flow model" thinking I was hoping he would address some insightful ideas on viruses as agents, or high level ruminations about this obvious "hyperobject" transversing our reality in 2020, a "virus on a mission", or how we are being reminded by the more-than-human about it's real existence, how we could embrace this time of change to do better magic, for our own healing, the healing of others, about changing the world, about making fucking solarpunk real!

Nothing! Nada! Just antivax rants about Bill Gates and the dangers of 5G! Are you fucking kidding me?

Worst of all, this ongoing right wing conspiracy babble seemed to seep into everything Rune Soup related.....wait...now that I am writing this I have to chuckle. It has become literal Rune Soup: right wing spirituality infested black goo creeping into the brains of some of its Premium Members. Or is it the other way around?

"At this point in the timeline" I cannot but see RSPM as either a gnostic doomsday cult or an alt-right echo chamber, or both.

Yeah there's the nice sounding phrase "Mutual Flourishing" being thrown around lately, but it seems to be either all about becoming gnostic permaculture preppers or using that phrase as marketing for creating a new Leonormand deck, an endeavor he also likes to call a little "sanctuary-making gambit". No marketing is even needed. It's a product already sold. The Premium Members will probably happily pay whatever for it, funding GW's new cult leader lifestyle. How mutual is the flourishing really?

Exiting the Vampire Castle

There is part of me that thinks maybe there is a magical explanation for what's happening with Rune Soup:

Somehow I am not really surprised GW is drifting off. Some of his "tech" has been quite disrespectful towards the spirits he "works" with. He used to jokingly refer to it as "bullying" but that's literally what he has been doing and teaching. It's a typical utilitarian "chaos magic" attitude that might have pissed off quite a few in the more-than-human world.

Also, in Western esoteric systems the spirit world is all about kingship, structures, hierarchies. Maybe when you regularly align yourself with that logic which is unavoidable when following systems of spirit interaction in this tradition, it becomes a habit to "subconsciously" think in those patterns. When you then start to form a hierarchical system in the material world (community, cult), in some sense mirroring the spirit logic, you might get the full attention of certain types of entities and ideas that fuel authoritarian logic even more.

Too far fetched? Too superstitious? Might be an influence, but certainly does not account for the big picture. It feels too systemic and all too human.

"When you squint down at it" RSPM in fact reveals itself as a quite neoliberally operated and marketed conspirituality brand rather than the resilitent animist in-group of operand solarpunk magicians it likes to present itself as... and despite years and years of GW ranting against exactly that: neoliberalism.

In her essay "Comrade" Jodi Dean sharply summarizes the logic of neoliberalism - that uncannily resembles the pattern I experienced around Rune Soup in 2020 and ongoing:

There is individualized self-cultivation, self-management, self-reliance, self-absorption, and—at the same time—impersonal determining processes, circuits, and systems. We have responsible individuals, individuals who are responsibilized, treated as loci of autonomous choices and decisions, and we have individuals encountering situations that are utterly determining and outside their control.

Instead of ethics and economics, neoliberalism’s displacement of politics manifests in the opposition between survivors and systems. The former struggle to persist in conditions of unlivability rather than to seize and transform these conditions. The latter are systems and “hyperobjects” determining us, often aesthetic objects or objects of a future aesthetics, things to view and diagram and predict and perhaps even mourn, but not to affect.

Survivors experience their vulnerability. Some even come to cherish it, to derive their sense of self from being able to survive against all that is stacked against them. [...] For them, the fight to survive is the key feature of an identity imagined as dignified and heroic because it has to produce itself by itself.

If you need more convincing, someone pointed me to this article the other day: Here's what the journalist Matthew Remski wrote in his analysis of the general phenomenon of "conspirituality" on Medium:

As social media becomes dominant, personal branding constellates around the archetype of the singular hero or “thought leader” who changes the world, one post or workshop at a time. But the influencer’s goal is not really social change. It’s “disruption”. Aspirational wellness content that can be spiced up with disruptive “transgression” becomes highly valued in a competitive landscape. This provides the template for the conspiritualist influencer: the solitary hero promising unique and personal salvation for body and spirit in times of crisis.

No, thanks! I am not only done with Rune Soup, I feel like I need a shower to wash it off.

I’m officially parting with RSPM. I’ve been really struggling with the direction of the membership over the past year and took the time to write down the things that didn’t sit well with me. Feel free to read it if you feel called to do so. pic.twitter.com/yUtM5EUfZE
— adam (@madamlehman) January 15, 2021

Fortunately I found out I was not the only one who felt like this. After a public Twitter callout of Gordon's politics by Michael M. Hughes and a less pleasant shitstorm that followed there was a spontaneous initiative started by some disenchanted Soupies to get together to mourn, kvetch, and heal, and to move on and build something new. This initiative has the fitting name The Others. I joined them and I am glad I did. Feels like a new home, warm and welcoming, and full of energy to integrate the present and move into a magical future, to fix Omelas instead of walking away from it.

Postscriptum

I honestly hope this whole mindfuck is just a dark episode of a person having difficulties to cope with the current situation and trying to make sense of the uncertainties. It is very understandable and I empathize. I wish GW the energy and wisdom to get himself back out of this mess, realize and reflect on what he is doing. It is just unfortunate to drag hundreds of paying followers into this. I know it's all voluntary and stuff, yet there's also group dynamics.

If you are a RSPM yourself, and some of the things I wrote resonated with you, feel free to reach out.

If you think I should not have published this but written GW a private email instead: there's nothing to "resolve" here. It's a few years too late for that. Plus, from some friends experiences there doesn't seem to be much acceptance of criticism from his side anyway.

Why publish it in the first place and not just keep it to myself you ask? Because I felt the need to write it down and stand up against it. And not in the shape of a Twitter shitstorm.

If you find my accusations unfair and hyperbolic, my apologies. They come from a hurt place. If you disagree and feel this post is slanderous or just ridiculous, please understand that this is my personal opinion and experience and I tried to express it in the fairest way possible.

If you believe Covid-19 is fake and Bill Gates wants to cull humanity, leave me the fuck alone.