The only living witness...

Depressing as it is to read speculations about China one day launching electromagnetic pulse bomb attacks against the United States, I suppose at least this pic offers a salutary reminder that things could be even worse if a omnicidal maniac ever had the means at their disposal to deliver destruction on an even larger scale. So don't tell me that this blog never looks on the sunny side of life, right?

There's no way for me to be sure of course, but I'm constantly amazed at the numbers of requests for help I've noticed editors get from Chinese students looking to get into MIT and the like to study computer science. Many of the applicants refer to their interest in hacking/security issues, so I can't help wondering if the ulterior motive is sometimes to later use this knowledge for cyberwar (including accessing the knowledge bases of foreign corporations to learn how they make their products, so their Chinese competitors can attempt to copy and improve them).

I don't want to make this sound like Sinophobia though, not least because I think the political  science and computer science departments of any university in the West you can name are in all likelihood equally complicit in state security issues. With regard to political science, for example, one need only consider the critiques of South East Asian Studies as being too closely aligned to the objectives of the U.S. State Department, given its downplaying of the significance of revolution as a developmental logic in this region, in the interest of emphasizing functionalist systems theory instead.

Having said that, the fact remains that China's comparatively low ranking on the Press Freedom Index indicates it is inherently more difficult for its Fourth Estate to "witness" and thereby preempt the kind of realpolitik I've referred to in this post.

The Egocrat

Further to yesterday's post about the British Royal Family:

'according to lefort, the new trend, however, is again toward the display of the public official's person. the state now relies on its double in "the image of the people, which... remains indeterminate, but which nevertheless is susceptible of being determined, of being actualized on the level of phantasy as an image of the People-as-One." Public figures increasingly take on the function of concretizing that fantasmatic body image, or in other words, of actualizing the otherwise indeterminate image of the people. They embody what Lefort calls the "Egocrat," whose self-identical representativeness is perverse and unstable in a way that contrasts with the representative person of the feudal public sphere. "The prince condensed in his person the principle of power..., but he was supposed to obey a superior power... That does not seem to be the position of the Egocrat or of his substitutes, the bureaucratic leaders. The Egocrat coincides with himself, as society is supposed to coincide with itself.'

page 387-8.

in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by craig calhoun. published by the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England. 1992.

essay by michael warner. 'The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.'

Hyper-real religions?

It's taken me a long time to post this link. I can agree with some of what Mark Dery says here, perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much I had enjoyed his take on the pop culture presence of Nazism (previously posted on this blog). Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot adopts a typical [postmodern] media studies approach to popular culture, which certainly yields some valuable insights. It demonstrates how the [unfortunate] predominance of McLuhan as media theorist in the academy is parallelled in cyberculture. According to Dery, computer geeks who believe the "medium is the message" are only too happy to identify with their slimy, tentacled counterparts:

"...the octopus was the poster animal for the...techno-transcendentalist strain in digital culture. Embodying the profoundly anti-modernist (and inescapably religious) dream of healing the rupture between language and meaning, signifier and signified, the octopus “does not transmit its linguistic intent, it becomes its linguistic intent.” This, said McKenna, is “the essence of a more perfect Logos, a Logos not heard but beheld.” Forgetting that visual imagery is no less culturally contingent and historically contextual than words, he envisioned the use of VR to “change vocal utterance into visually beheld colored output,” which he believed would “telepathically” communicate linguistic intent through “the unambiguous topology of meanings beheld,” as if visual representation and subjective meaning were a seamless whole, and not subject to the same semiotic slippage that bedevils language. Anyway, we can dream, can’t we? “In the not-too-distant future, men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea.”

Of course, I'm equally intrigued by the slippages between ethology and cultural anthropology, just as much as I was in the adoption of the generic "alien" as the mascot of rave culture. Both creatures are tool users afterall, making it easier to compare and contrast their respective cultural significance (the "alien" was previously highlighted on this blog). Dery also references the spread of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in this context, arguing that it runs parallel to, but is not congruent with, the cephalopod "meme" (the use of this term is itself a clear indicator of neo-Darwinism's pervasive cultural influence). According to him, its adherents are more ironic in their attitude to moral truth and literal fact.

What does the sociology of religion have to say about all this? I am thinking here particularly of Adam Possamai's "Yoda Goes to the Vatican", which briefly touches on Cthulhu cultists. He too sees the Internet as playing a formative role (hence the Baudrillardian resonance of "hyper-real" religions) in the growth of such alternative religions, particularly among young people who are equally savvy with technology and pop culture.

To my eyes though, it is unfortunate that he and Dery- the latter ironically refers in passing to "memes"- make no real allowance for the "science as culture" thesis, commonly associated with STS (Science & Technology Studies), which could have shed some light on the central conceit of the Cthulhu Mythos. Afterall, nowadays various science advocates, not least Richard "memes" Dawkins and Paul Davies, give greater credence to the idea that life originated from outer space (with Dawkins crediting a sophisticated alien civilization) rather than from God:

Here is another science fiction representation of directed panspermia:

Dery is therefore a little off target when he claims that all Cthulhu cultists are necessarily postmodern ironists: why settle for irony when the idea of panspermia means one can now selectively draw on scientific authority to legitimate their own brand of "cosmic horror", irrespective of how willfully perverse and implausible this appears to the rest of us? And dare I mention Cthulhu cultist Darrick Dishaw, who dreams of the day when he can perform human sacrifices in his rituals, along with other unsavory practices? I can't see any irony at work here.

Moving along, this is not really that surprising, given how science has in some cases clearly mutated from occulture. Consider, for example, alchemy's relationship to the development of modern chemistry, and how figures such as Aleister Crowley were feted by the literati of their day; comprised of theosophists and amateur scientists. Indeed, the occult periodical press came into being to publicize occult ideas, to support emerging occult institutions and settle disputes within a counter-public sphere of occultism, and to legitimate occult knowledge in the dominant public sphere in quasi-scientific terms of validation.

In a similar vein, Darwin's legacy has tended to reinforce Lovecraft's influence on another religion cited by Possamai- namely, the Church of Satan. Like Crowley before him then, Anton LaVey drew on literary and (pseudo) scientific influences.The Church's doctrines are accordingly not theistic, but rooted instead in mechanistic materialism. This emphasis eventually led to a split in the Church, which resulted in the formation of the Temple of Set. The latter attempted to highlight intelligence as a distinctive attribute of human beings, but I can only guess that this stance made them seem a little out of step with the neo-Darwinian sentiments of most Satanists (or perhaps they were simply less opportunistic). This may have been their undoing (in contrast-- tellingly-- LaVey may have died, but the Church of Satan remains an ongoing concern).
I do agree with Possamai though that these religions cannot be dismissed as mere escapism. My point is not that the burden of proof shifts to theism alone, or that relativism is the only option (as implied by the characterization of "hyper real" religions). When assessing the relative merits of any of the belief systems I've discussed here, the important distinction is between:

"...philosophical rationalism of which the hallmark is deduction, and the inductive empirical workaday of normal science. This blurring leads one to easily dismiss theism on scientific grounds. Fern Elsdon-Baker rightly, in my view, points out that while some versions of theism can be empirically refuted (e.g., literalism which supports Young Earth Creationism), others can only be philosophically denied (e.g., philosophical Deism). The empirical inductive tools of science are of limited scope, and to assert that something is a scientific question does not make it amenable to scientific methods. Words are not magic".

There is something else that the overuse of "postmodern" tends to lose sight of. As Mark S. Morrisson has argued, the dialectic is between esotericism and the exoteric. The former involves ideas of secret knowledge that are directly experienced, leading to union with the divine. The latter refers to the public dimensions of religion, including church institutions and publicly propagated knowledge. This is a process that has been going on in counter public spheres since the late nineteenth century. The advent of the Internet has of course aided the dissemination of these ideas, but I believe the novelty of the situation should not be exaggerated through an over-reliance on McLuhan-esque cultural critique. Testing the concept of "self-religion", as developed by Paul Heelas, with reference to Morrisson's dialectic, seems like a more worthwhile exercise. Self-religion initially appears incompatible with the kind of "real externality" characteristic of "cosmic horror", but I can't really comment until I read Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jesper Aagaard Petersen.

In any case, Possamai's focus is more on how religion started to openly mesh with popular culture in the 1960s. With him and Dery specifically mentioning Lovecraft, it's also interesting to note (in addition to the i09 article on Lovecraft in Japan) the following:

Tatsumi's book [Full Metal Apache] is useful not only as a guide to works we might otherwise have overlooked but also to works we thought we knew well. He makes us aware, for example, of Yasuo Nagayama's "postcolonialist rereading" of "Godzilla," particularly Nagayama's insight that the monster may have had his genesis not in a nuclear mishap but rather in "a pseudoreligious and pseudoscientific theory championed by 19th-century Shintoist Masumi Ohishigori" -- new information for most readers.

"Deeply influenced by the rise of Darwinism and paleontology, Ohishigori," we learn, "came to invent an amazing theory that located the origin of man in dinosaurs born of Japanese gods." Some of these divine dinosaurs, Ohishigori's followers believed, survive deep in the ocean, and when one recalls that Godzilla seems to have emerged from the sea, one feels certain that the monster's creators had Ohishigori's theory somewhere in the backs of their minds.

Whether this amounts to cosmic horror in the truly Lovecraftian sense remains to be determined. If I ever get round to looking at this a bit more closely, I'd be interested in investigating the extent to which the passage of such pseudo religious and pseudoscientific ideas into the Japanese public sphere mirrored the process described by Morrisson, and whether they too could be construed in the terms of Possamai and Dery.

Disco Marxism

I'm conscious of not wanting to appear as if my post on the Continental philosophy blogosphere was merely shadowboxing with any of the substantive issues such a mode of reasoning might potentially raise. Therefore I think it incumbent on me to also map out the two of the basic options it makes available. I wonder only if each eventually coalesces with my typology of the noosphere. Simon Critchley has made a case that one should ideally set out to avoid espousing what he describes as "Disco Marxism", as briefly explained in the following clip:

Critchley has elaborated on this position in the edited collection, Radical Democracy. From my initial inspection of the contents, there is some potential compatibility with the expressed preference on this blog for utilising the critical concept of the public sphere (as discussed in one chapter by Laclau). But I'm yet to discover any convergence with the emphasis in social theory on cosmopolitan public spheres as necessary in the negotiation of global cultural identities. It is not clear to me that general references to "difference" are up to the job. In this respect, Pheng Cheah's work on cosmopolitics could mark a more convincing intervention of a Continental perspective, in light of the fact that he has also considered Chinese cosmopolitanism, and finds the Habermasian vision wanting on account of its [alleged] Eurocentric view that solidarity can be evoked by entwining national and global public spheres. A long time ago I posted an audio of Gerard Delanty talking about cosmopolitanism, and I know he has done subsequent work on Europe and Asia: Beyond East and West, so I suspect he is mindful of critiques of Habermas, and notwithstanding their differences, one thing that connects them is a willingness to include empirical work, thereby moderating the tendencies that can be found in the noosphere, and by association, Disco Marxism.

However, the latter point requires some qualification, as the 2 authors which dominate the Continental blogosphere, Deleuze and Zizek, can in some sense be put to work against the presumptions of Disco Marxism. I've just referenced an article by Wark, and I do not endorse his own use of Debord and Deleuze as any great advance over the forms of cultural studies he critiques in the piece. I do, however, suggest the piece is useful in setting out the basic telling conceptual differences between Disco Marxism, lack and abundance, which I imagine would be accepted as a conventional characterisation by the Continental blogosphere.
Be this as it may, it does not dissuade me from wanting to further pursue the mapping of this blogosphere as discussed in my earlier post. Therefore I remain interested in its conditions of emergence and dissemination, and stand by my noting of the characteristic lack of empirical robustness. It can still be said that the Continental philosophy/cultural studies blogosphere functions as depicted in The Matrix, with an Agent Smith running amok through the network, converting everyone into a clone of Zizek and Deleuze.

I had no idea what Wark was talking about in his piece when he complains about the imperative to always be "resisting something", so I sought solace instead in this vivid illustration of Herbert Marcuse's vision (think Eros and Civilization particularly):

"Indoctrinate U"?

As if we needed further reminder that the academy is a contested public sphere, and thereby cannot be equated in a knee jerk fashion with antiquated notions of "the ivory tower", "ritual" etc, the debates featured in this [right wing] documentary come readymade with the strategies familiar from "the science wars", the questioning of the academic legitimacy of cultural studies, and "political correctness" more generally. What is novel though is the forums in which they are opening up, as the presence of this trailer on youtube attests.
For the record, a debate between opposing sides, namely a progressive academic and the libertarian filmmaker, can be found from this link, which amounts to an excellent rejoinder by the former, as well as a resource worth monitoring in the future [given the resurgence of such debates].