Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded

Agnes Horvath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367894412
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000356564
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores politics as a form of alchemy, understood as the transformation of entities through an alteration of their identities. Identifying this process as a common denominator of many political phenomena, such as EU integration, mediatisation, communism or globalisation, the author demonstrates not only the widespread presence of alchemical techniques in politics, but also the acceleration of their deployment. A study of the steady growth of power as it reaches a continuous and permanent stage, thus avoiding the inherent difficulties connected with birth and death of political organisations and institutions, this volume reveals political alchemy to be a form of self-sustaining growth through sterile multiplication, devoid of meaning. Revealing both the integrative and disintegrative nature of a political process that, while appearing to work in the interests of all, in fact produces apathy, desperate mobilisation and despair by crushing concrete entities such as personality and tradition, Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory and political thought.

1 Necromancy ¹

Necromancy, in the real sense of the term, does appear, in recognizable form, in the shaft burials designed to attract the supernatural, or to relate the buried one to the world of the infinite. Necromancy is a replicating act of forcing the infinite supreme to realize the similarity between itself and the deceased, in our case in the hollowed penetration of the earth. For many thousands of years, from the Atapuerca² shaft burials, the association never faded away between the long, narrow stem and the summoning of the infinite. From then on, its after-effect results came uninterruptedly, and it is no exaggeration to say that they have shaped history, up to our times. Historically speaking, these similarities are the shape of the burrows that are elongated, roughly cylindrical, suggesting something of a tree trunk, similar to the formation of the earth, often cited by Ancient authors, together with its rotating and transmitting power that functions in perfect equilibrium, as it appears in Anaximander, Anaximenes and Plato (Furley 1987: 26). The first coherent description of the matrix is offered by the Greeks (Couprie 2018: 50), who summon this vision into one vast machine of forces, with upward or downward movements that are symmetrical about the central point of the cosmic sphere, the earth, which is hollow and round, like a round trunk and itself in the middle of the cosmos, where we ourselves in nature have our place, inside the hollows of the earth. We live in such hollows (Plato, Phaedo 109c),³ we live in a place that is infinitely matrixing, creating and destroying itself. But it would be surprising to see that matrixing, or linear transformation, could be repeated by necromancy, even though only in a circular and not a linear way.

However, hollows are the most extreme forms. Their own equipoise and their homogeneously voided nature can only recall an absolute negative,⁴ something that is not real. It has no sides, and emptiness does not, in fact, result in a conciliatory form of reality. The nothing is placed in the centre of something which is homogeneous and cannot change its inclination in any direction, but will always remain in the same position, while its solitude exercises power, like a diaphysis,⁵ that grows and produces its essence continuously. In this respect the hollow is a type, in so far as understanding comprehends it as a nil, an in-betweenness or space holder. Somehow it is similar to the square root (√),⁶ though it has two sides that do not meet, leaving an empty space in between, so it might be treated as diabolical or as divine, or both at the same time, the supreme power. The divine responds accordingly, in the way of the holy to the holy,⁷ and the diabolical also, meaning in an atrocious manner. The simple shaft hollows of burials are the paths that lead to this otherworld, hollows themselves.

The rites and ceremonies practised here on earth are addressing this hollow partly to participate in the infinite power of its fluxing sensuals, partly to gain access to its infinite transformative wealth and growth (as expressed by the square root symbol, √).⁸ The matrix implies a linearity, while the raising power⁹ is a circularity, while they are both incommensurable. But the most important is the magic discovered technique itself, which is equal for any sorcery, necromancy or alchemy, being always the same, implying the invitation of the replicator into bodily composition, or for possession. In this manner the difference between the two, the composed and the infinite is annulated, so they have become similar to each other: the replicator has the form of the composed one, and the composed one the image of the replicator.

Replicators are agents of the matrixing otherworld. On this essential point replication never varies, as souls, or image rays are transformed into other structural features inside the matrix, but replicators only replicate inside the living bodies of the forms. This is so because replicators are those millions of types of radiations that are found in every ecosystem in the cosmos, and they are the most numerous types of image entities, when the courses of these rays are accumulated in the matrix into another output image form. The study of rays is known as cosmology, including religious, mythological or physical cosmology, from the earlier Babylonian cosmology to the most recent zero entropy cyclic model. When not inside a body form or in the process of possessing a body, replicators exist in the form of independent sensuals, free, liberated and infinite in their variations of image rays, consisting of memory that is coding their inclinations, the vector of their desires, and in some cases a very little matter also, that envelopes their sensuals, which gives their shape, from the range of triangles to the polyhedrons.¹⁰ Most importantly, sensuals can be imitated and reproduced, while they also evolve through natural processes, although they have minimal bodily/material form, having little of the key characteristics of bodily forms. They are able to possess bodies, keeping them, and also – when time has matured them – to leave them, at the point of death, and to continue a bodiless existence, so their reproduction is a determining factor that provides access to the understanding of political alchemy. So sensuals are generally considered irrational, infinite, immortal and indivisible, fully occupying the territory of death and partly taking control in life, but not necessarily counted as real. Because they possess some but not all qualities of a composition, sensuals can be described as possessive, replicating, unreal existences: output image forms of the otherworld that all together function as the matrix. Replicators consist of pure sensuals, and sensuals with different formation of rays, which are the images of forms. They do not have a body, although they can have memories. Sensuals make the structure (matrix) move, and thus generate the infinite movement of the otherworld. When the operators set up a fake matrix, their intention is to get into or occupy a space in the otherworld, and influence its movements.

Sensuals spread in many ways: they can be transmitted by similar feelings, or by pretending to feel similarities. In both cases they open pathways to their invasion, occupation and possession of the desired body. Such invasion can be narrow or wide, depending on the readiness of the body for possession. Here the operators have a significant role: they are able to carry on the readiness of the body–form to accept the possession. One possible pathway is through sending messages, images or other information from one location to another by means of radiating rays of sounds, lights, movements or sensuals. This way sensuals might be transmitted from hollows to hollows by the operators, carried by those who are able to incite and canalize them. Sensuals are passed by contact and enter those bodies that lie in their pathways.

Opening pathways

The opening of pathways, a crucial element in the processuality of necromancy can be captured through an alternative image in Lascaux: the unique case of narrative scenery in the entire 25,000 years of Palaeolithic cave painting.¹¹ This is the Shaft Scene in a hidden recess of Lascaux’s painted cave, where a singular, alternative as alternating narrative was captured in the place where otherwise the charis-centred Palaeolithic vision of the world got its central depiction. As the Shaft Scene inflated all the negativity of its participants who were connected in a flexible series of desirous links, a copulating desire that was used for holding them together, the result was an opening of reproductive processuality.

We are in a shaft, inside the Lascaux cave hollow itself, as the Shaft Scene can be found – as it was called, after its dramaturgy – at the end of a small recess, on the right of the passageway that connects the nave to the main hall in the prehistoric cave (Aujoulat 2005: 26, 40–2, 158–61). Its access from the passageway is difficult, as one must negotiate a 6-metre drop hollow to reach the bottom level – while the ceiling levels are identical. But it is practically impossible to return from the Shaft to the main cave area, which contains a completely different style of paintings (Ruspoli 1987: 138). Furthermore, it is now widely accepted that there was originally a second entrance to the cave, from which one could get access to the Shaft – though not beyond, firmly indicating the singular importance of the scenery.

The Shaft was therefore an authentic alternative sanctuary, outside the main paintings¹² and ritual sceneries, yet closely connected to them, to which some people might have been attracted, with the promise of sharing some hidden secrets which the guardians of the ruling cult were unwilling or unable to gain access to. Such hidden secrets might have provided a knowhow about the opening processes discussed above, in a striking difference to the no-man, no-sex, no-violence images in prehistoric cave paintings. They are painted in a rather primitive, anti-evolutionary, anti-Saussure-ian sign language of a seduction scenery, where everybody is hurt, and which is still saturated with the same monstrous dream of revenge on forms, with the surprising end-result of abundance. Here the intention of harming in return for a desire-related injury suffered at the presence of the participants turned out to produce richness. The destructive dream turned out to be useful, as it opened up the sources concerning how to give and to take in a way of artificial reproduction.

The basic thing concerning the Shaft Scene is that it breaks with the standard distinction between painting animals and humans as only engraved, by enacting a painted image for the human being as well, and that it depicts a phallic man urging for copulation. The novelty of this image, a class in its own, is well defined by the phallus of the masked figure, which has again no equals in cave paintings. It is true that in the caves there were other phallic signs present, but they were only symbols, not a definite member united to a human body. This small figure in the Shaft Scene, with its elementary, vulgar pose entraps and annihilates the whole tiresome effort of a dozen millennia of work and art, reducing magnificent art into one base – rather than basic – gesture. The Shaft Scene changes entanglement with the divine into detachment, thus alternating the process of equal strength to its inverse, to opening up. In opposition to the paintings, where everything is moving together in harmony, being caught firmly by an operational will that has, invisibly, embroiled together the magnificent figures into a charis-inspired world vision, this scenery visibly separates them into three different entities: the phallic figure, the animals of the supreme powers, and the bird, the animal of the soul spirit. Between them a new form of communication is enacted: that of the erotically possessive one.

Operators start their action when the structure enters a crisis. At this moment the composed force of the structure is lost, and the replicators can take up the place of the soul, overtaking the structure, and start to reproduce themselves. All three participants in the Shaft Scene image are alienated from their own shape and form: the figure from his human form by the mask, the divine from its divinity by lust, while the dislocated spirit has received a separate entity in the form of the bird on the staff. Furthermore, the pose of the human is in itself contradictory, schismatic, defending and attacking at the same time: the body lying on the ground with wide open arms shows that he is being subjected to external forces to which he gives itself up, while his erect phallus demonstrates his objecting to the perceived violator, but at the same time also that from now on his actions, by becoming violent, only perpetuate the logic of the perpetrator.

But the most astonishing thing is the mask, which is worn by a phallic human creature with bird-like claws, clearly already attached to the otherworld by images not its own. He faces on the right side a bison, widely interpreted as a divine appearance, which however also alludes to a broken unity through an arrow-like sign. The bowel-like drawing under the bison expresses a maze symbol¹³ that has suddenly become visible – as if it fell out of the body of the bison, a supreme power essence. Finally, on the left, as if alluding to a narrative – which is again unique for Palaeolithic cave art, as no other such painting has a narrative aspect – there is a rhinoceros and a spectre with a bird on it. They belong to the same scene, shown by the manner in which they are facing each other: the bird’s beak faces the rhino’s anus, which is opened up in a manner opposite to the way the tail of the bison is lifted up. There are also six dots painted next to the anal area, arranged in three pairs – as if the dots were just now being born out of the back part of the rhino.¹⁴ The rhino is giving birth to something multiplicative, in definite connection with the bird’s beak, as if this referred to a difference between the digestive system of humans and birds: while in the case of the latter only one orifice serves both for secreting waste and for reproduction, human beings have three, each well-defined and distinct. All three of these anatomic functions are brought into one line, as indicated by the bird’s beak, representing with its phallic, copulative form the cloacae as well, that it is itself the one who is fertilising, excreting waste and laying an egg. Here we enter the unreal dimensions of the magic that is evoking sensual images in order to have communication with the otherworld. Turning back to the language of Goethe, here the soul is already sold, and the result is shown by growth and multiplication.

A replication chain is depicted here: from the replicated bison’s bird-like soul to the man’s mask and his bird fingers, and from the man’s bird essence to the rhino’s behind, and then back to the bison, as the rhino and the bison are mirror images of each other. It is not only the circular movement of the replication that is astonishing here – recalling a later development in the circular non-number of the zero – but the presence of the utter hopelessness in the whole movement; not only because the reciprocal links between the bison and the rhino could function perfectly well without their operator. Now the circle contains two equal beings, which are mirror images of each other, the bison and the rhino. The phallic figure of the Shaft Scene is unnecessary in the circle; this is why the operator is using a mask, mimicking the divine, disguising strength and so leaving a hole in the picture like a knife in the wound: a hole, a 0 (zero), which many thousand years later would grow into a mathematical symbol of destruction, but paradoxically also of growth.

Such a combination of three figures together does not exist either in Lascaux, or in any other Palaeolithic cave. However, this is not the case with the dots. They are general symbols in the caves, but the particular three pairs of dots are reproduced at the very end of the Southern shaft, just after the Chambers of the Felines and a very enigmatic ‘house on the tree’, though the colours there are different (Eshleman 2003: 188). Given that the Chambers of the Felines are in the area of the main cave of Lascaux that is most difficult to access, and that the images there depict more frightening animals, it might be argued that they represent an alteration to the existing arrangements of the main halls. This lends further credit to the idea that the designers of the Shaft Scene intended it to represent something like a difficult and secret trial. Even if they did not want to undermine completely the master idea of the cave itself, they certainly introduced the key modalities for altering its usage.

Forcing subversion

The interpretation of the Shaft Scene as the decomposition of the reciprocity between the divine, animal and human realms can be supported by a number o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: The unbounded as infinite
• Introduction
• 1. Necromancy
• 2. The fluxed matrix
• 3. Replicators in compositions
• 4. Charis vs the automaton
• 5. The raised power
• 6. Catacombing sensuals
• 7. The multiplicative automatism
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index