<nettime> Lars Bang Larsen on Suzanne Treister's Radical Enlightenment

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(posted to nettime on behalf of Suzanne Treister. /geert)

Essay by Lars Bang Larsen

(Published in HEXEN 2.0, Black Dog Publishing, London 2012, in the  
context of the Hexen 2.0 exhibit  in the Science Museum, London from  
March 7 -May 1 2012, see also http://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/HEXEN_2_LBLessay.html)

The Secret Life of Control: Suzanne Treister's Radical Enlightenment

http://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/HEXEN_2_LBLessay.html

You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the  
philosophers were grinding lenses. It's all a grand preparation for  
something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be  
perfect and then we're all going to see clearly, see what a  
staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is...

Henry Miller, quoted from Gilles Deleuze: Spinoza. Practical  
Philosophy (1970)

These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process... to  
apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect  
is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic... If  
you want the truth-I know I presume-you must look into the technology  
of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules... you  
must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis?  
And then: what is the real nature of control?

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Unsurprisingly, considering that she trafficks in unwritten  
genealogies, the title of Suzanne Treister's HEXEN 2.0 hides  
contraband. Diverting the project's signification from references to  
witchcraft, the Greek word Hexis means coherence or cohesion; not just  
understood as a structural unity, but the source of all qualities in a  
body. Thus Hexis is defined by producing tensional motion in a body or  
across several bodies. On one ancient account, "there is a tensional  
motion in bodies which moves simultaneously inwards and outwards."[i]  
It is easy to picture Treister's work and its straddling of  
disciplines, discourses and cultural hierarchies as a dynamic mover  
that produces continual and contrary motions in or across bodies:  
physical bodies, concept-bodies, the body politic.

Through the lens of the Macy Conferences that took place in the US for  
more than a decade during and after WWII, HEXEN 2.0 is an  
investigation of the scientific underpinnings of what Michel Foucault  
called bio-political governance; the government that rules with  
information, and through life. For Foucault, bio-political governance  
dates back to the 18th century, when society's control over  
individuals became internalised and conducted in and with the body  
through refined medical, cultural educational and administrative  
technologies. He sees it proliferating with contemporary neo- 
liberalism that tweaks and fine-tunes institutional and commercial  
parameters for citizenship through the "mystical calculus of the  
infinitesimal and infinite [that in bio-politics supervises] the  
smallest fragment of life."[ii] Offering an anatomy of contemporary  
control society, the anti-disciplinary hexis of Treister's project is  
the story of the living human body that is modeled by deeply  
mutational institutions and practices. The recent history of the  
apparatuses that allow and reproduce such administrative mutations is  
one in which forms of knowledge and sovereignty are at stake vis-a-vis  
technological fantasy, military power and scientific research.

Held in New York between 1946-1953 the Macy Conferences were meetings  
between Cyberneticians and social scientists whose aim-as fundamental  
as it was immodest-it was to outline a science of the workings of the  
human mind. It is rare that one can identify an event when scientists  
decided to collectively set the controls for the heart of sun. Even if  
they didn't get there, perhaps, in terms of establishing a  
functionalistic model for the human mind, they at least made sure to  
produce much epistemological turbulence. Perhaps these types of  
meetings can only happen during a war or as its afterquake; "suppose  
we considered the war itself as a laboratory?", as one character in  
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow muses.[iii] Indeed, it is difficult to  
imagine the Macy Conferences taking place without the WWII as the  
categorical imperative for confronting the human mind as a ticking  
bomb that may go off again at any minute with another Hitlerism,  
another conflagration as its result. This will also account for  
similar research initiatives in the post-war period, such as the  
Frankfurt School's The Authoritarian Personality study (which is in  
the middle of Treister's Anarcho-Primitivism Diagram), as well as  
socio-psychological conceptualizations of conformism such as Herbert  
Marcuse's 'One-Dimensional Man', William H. Whyte's 'Organization Man'  
and Wilhelm Reich's 'Little Man'.

At the Macy Conferences, cyberneticists and social scientists such as  
Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Heinrich Klüver, Molly  
Harrower, and Arturo Rosenblueth, among other distinguished scholars,  
arrived at a knowledge model that encompassed certain engineering  
devices as well as aspects of human behaviour. A synthesis was  
heralded with cybernetics as a new paradigm for interdisciplinary  
research across the sciences in which one can talk about systems and  
feedback processes, including biology, psychology and information  
theory, and many more: "Essentially the idea was to identify in a  
behaviorist spirit some of those aspects of what organisms do that can  
be analyzed in terms of what certain analogous machines do."[iv]  
Needless to say, computers as we know them today, were yet to be built- 
but its contours may have been divined by the Macy participants, as  
the apparatus that could catch human and machinic behaviour in its  
crosshairs.

According to Gilles Deleuze disciplinary society began to break down  
after WWII. This was when "new forces moved slowly into place, then  
made rapid advances." It is a good guess that some of the forces to  
which he alluded were set in movement, probably inadvertently, by the  
Macy Conferences. Control, then-the new governmental instrument-is  
neither discipline's organisation of sites of confinement, nor is it  
the abstract machine of modernism's grid, but a modulation, "a self- 
transmuting molding continually changing from moment to the next, or  
like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another." Such a meta- 
stability is a kind of plasma whose organic vitality ominously merges  
with functions of monitoring.

In a motific overlap with the manipulated photo HEXEN 2.0/Cybernetic  
Séance in which Macy Conference participants are seen as participants  
at a spiritualist séance, Thomas Pynchon also organises various holy  
circles in Gravity's Rainbow. As already indicated by the quote at the  
beginning of this text, these are characterized by a strange and lucid  
objectivity invested in an analysis of control by severing rationality  
from morally and politically instituted judgments of normal knowledge.  
Thus at the first sitting in the novel is described a circle of  
etherically inclined sitters who, much like the scientists in  
Cybernetic Séance- "is not at all distracted or hindered. None of your  
white hands or luminous trumpets here."[v] Also the medium (or the  
entity speaking through him) comes through loud and clear, with an  
incisive proclamation: "It's control. All these things arise from one  
difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The  
control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside  
forces'..."[vi] This is Deleuze's control society, as it were: control  
springs alive and is inserted into the body by means of bio-political  
technologies, in order to work there as self-monitoring and self- 
management.

Against such vital and invasive control mechanisms one needs good  
hexis. In HEXEN 2.0, Treister works through the format of the tarot  
card, thereby tapping into the dynamic potential of occult knowledge  
forms to connect seemingly disparate historical dots in a kind of  
alchemical hypertext. Unlike the sometimes kinky embrace of the dark  
side of cognition through the esoteric formats employed by  
contemporary artists, Treister's approach is much less gestural, and  
does not refuse rationality. Thus what her work may have in common  
with Niki de Saint-Phalle's Giardino dei Tarocchi in Tuscany (1998)-a  
kind of post-Mannerist sculpture park whose monumental elements are  
based on the symbols of the tarot cards-is not the creativist spirit,  
but a feminist subtext whose rejection of nature yields an  
overwhelming mosaic of elements. Other contemporary artistic  
practitioners of the tarots include the cineast and dramaturg  
Alejandro Jodorowsky, an elderly Chilean gentleman one can meet on  
Wednesday afternoons at Café le Temeraire in Paris for a private  
session of psichomagia. While Jodorowsky sticks to the original  
function of the tarots as a self-technology appropriated ready-made  
for art, Treister-as we will see-takes a quite different approach to  
the magic deck.

The ineradicable instinct of the paranoiac is to locate or re-possess  
power. His aggressive idiosyncracy hides a particular hermeneutic  
stinginess: once located-power is usually seen to be elsewhere-the  
interpretation of power is fatal and diagrammatic. The aesthetic  
potential of paranoia has been seen as its potential for scrambling  
transparency. Thus Salvador Dali proposed his paranoiac method to  
create 'systematised confusion' with Surrealist machines of desire.  
Neither conception of paranoia, however, gels with HEXEN 2.0.  
Treister's project is fuelled not by power and  
desire,                  but by knowledge and pleasure. It is not  
distortional, but cartographic. It is a syllabus, a flowchart of  
connections and developments, a unique critical overview of modern  
intellectual and scientific history. The historical facts that  
Treister handles are of a nature that she couldn't have kept to  
herself, and so she dutifully follows the topological displacements  
and transformations of knowledge across many disciplines; knowledge's  
'tripping' through unofficially connected networks is affirmed by way  
of the tarot deck as an encyclopedic format.

Encyclopedic formats, understood as a comprehensive and simultaneous  
organization of available knowledge, are recurring elements in  
Treister's work, where facts proliferate rhizomatically. NATO  
(2004-8), for instance, consists of over 200 works illustrating the  
NATO codification system which numerically classifies and groups  
everything that exists in the world for potential military  
procurement; and [MTB] Military Training Base (2009) a wall sized  
drawing for a military base of the future which incorporates into its  
design ancient archaeological sites, Vatican City, an art school,  
global corporate complexes and sections of the Israeli West-Bank  
Barrier. Correspondence: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (2007-8), are  
324 pencil reproductions of letterheads from Government and  
Presidential Offices, Ministries of Defence, NGOs and arms  
manufacturers across the world, both past and current, and as they  
hang on the wall they look like so many ominous card blanches for  
authorising military action through the world-or conversely, like the  
artist's riffing on Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning (1953), a way of  
undoing through invocation.

Employing the tarot deck is thus not a quick-fix attempt at re- 
enchanting the world, but-apart from a homeopathic indication of  
occult aspects in the history leading up to control society-a  
structuring device that mirrors and performs procedures of mass  
intelligence gathering in the service of a new epistemology. One can  
perhaps compare it to a Turing Machine: a virtual system capable of  
simulating the behavior of any other machine or apparatus of  
knowledge, including itself.

In tarot lore The Ace of Pentacles, for instance, represents new  
beginnings, wealth and inspiration in material or financial matters,  
such as the energy to undertake a new business venture. In Treister's  
deck, it conflates The Four Technologies: nano-, bio- and info- 
technology as well as cognitive science. The drawing pulls quotes from  
a 2002 report commissioned by the US National Science Foundation whose  
title could have rolled off the tongue of Norbert Wiener: 'Converging  
Technologies for Improving Human Performance'. Browsing in the report  
itself, one will find detailed discussions on the beneficial effects  
of converging technologies in such different areas as "expanding human  
cognition", "improving human health", and (of course) "national  
security". One of its conclusions is, "Beyond the 20-year time span,  
or outside the current boundaries of high technology, convergence can  
have significant impacts in such areas as: work efficiency, the human  
body and mind throughout the life cycle, communication and education,  
mental health, aeronautics and space flight, food and farming,  
sustainable and intelligent environments, self-presentation and  
fashion, and transformation of civilization."[vii] Strangely, the  
overcoming of death isn't on the program yet, but just wait till the  
next report. Everything that rises must converge.

In Treister's deck, the original symbolic import of the tarots is used  
as ciphers that vie for their meaning with the new content that  
Treister has invested them with. This is in accordance with how tarot  
card readers read the person in front of them as carefully as the card  
that is called up: in this way the tarot deck allows you to reach for  
an object of knowledge through a system that is explicitly and  
opaquely coded, and therefore allows the operator of the deck to  
negotiate and undo the codes in the process. Thus if we take the Three  
of Swords (a card that urges to take a strong look at that which is at  
the centre of our world), it refers in Treister's version to CIA's  
infamous MKULTRA program, in which volunteers as well as unwitting  
civilians were guinea pigs for government mind control experiments  
with psychedelica. The program was run by one Dr. Sidney Gottlieb who,  
in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution, undertook to  
investigate "whether and how it was it was possible to modify an  
individual's behaviour by covert means."[viii] While the CIA  
eventually closed MKULTRA for want of usable results, the most  
manifest outcome of the program was in fact to unwittingly having  
helped to make LSD a hippie drug by turning on countercultural  
luminaries such as Ken Kesey (the subject of another tarot, the Knave  
of Chalices, and the drawing HEXEN 2.0/Diagrams/From MKULTRA via the  
Counterculture to Technogaianism). Other of Treister's tarot cards  
trace an underdog history of modern technology through grassroots  
movements (anarcho-syndicalists), and unruly individuals such as  
Timothy Leary and Stafford Beer who, in spite of their anti- 
authoritarian and 'spiritual' engagement with cybernetics rather  
translate into the 21st century as ambiguous avantgarde entrepreneurs.  
This is indeed a field that cannot be navigated in terms of truth and  
morality: it is a knotty, queasy, contemporary ontology.

Since the genealogies that Treister deals with have so far remained  
largely untold, it is only appropriate that she should employ an  
epistemologically virgin format. If historians haven't got these  
connections and events on their radar so far, then one shouldn't  
hesitate to use a new radar, a new device, a new unit that may capture  
and recognise historical reality. To use a format for heuristic  
knowledge organisation that is ostensibly obscurantist is, from a  
commonsensical point of view, counterintuitive. In science, however,  
the counterintuitive may represent a logical                  next  
step in a systematic investigation that has so far proven fruitless.  
Norbert Wiener, for one, was not averse to taking such an approach to  
cybernetics. Confronting the ethical implications of cybernetics on  
concepts of life, free will and evolution in his book, God & Golem,  
Inc. A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on  
Religion (1964), he strays from the common positivistic vocabulary in  
order to describe, or invoke, the full range of ethical considerations  
of modern science: "There is a sin, which consists of using the magic  
of modern automatization to further personal profit or let loose the  
apocalyptic terrors of nuclear warfare. If this sin is to have a name,  
let that name be Simony or Sorcery."[ix] Many other 20th century  
scientists had occult leanings. One was the poet and scientist  
Konstantin Ciolkovskij, whose research in rocket fuel kicked off the  
Soviet space program, a feat he considered secondary to his 'cosmic  
philosophy' in which he pondered correspondences between the will and  
creativity of the human brain and the eternal youth of the universe. 
[x] Playing out science on the terrain of the occult is not simply a  
binary inversion.

Divorced from its personal application, Treister employs the tarot  
card for readings of a collective destiny that matches up possible  
futures of reactivated knowledge and trace their effects back to our  
present. In other words, she separates technology from existing  
society, and creates reasonable doubt about existing technology as the  
receptor and effector organs we are given to navigate the  
technological city. The technologies, and the understanding of them,  
that were outlined at the Macy Conferences, are the materiality of  
affect of contemporary life. In order to comprehend the relations of  
production that have created the nervous system of contemporary man  
and woman-sensibilities, perceived dependency needs, habitual ways of  
seeing, accustomed velocities of life and so on-these technologies,  
and their institutional/commercial/governmental application that have  
valorised them symbolically and dedicated them to praxis, must be  
taken apart, synchronically and diachronically. Certain technologies  
didn't have to go in the direction they went, but can be backtracked.  
The way freedom can be reestablished as a critical concern doesn't go  
through dropping out or other kinds of system abandonment, then, but  
through positive feedback: reason and the human subject must re-enter  
the system in order to be 'reprogrammed'.

I would argue that through her artistic research, Treister rejoins  
intellectual history and a critique of contemporary control society  
with the tenets of a radical enlightenment. As a crucial event for the  
making of modern concepts of subjectivity, citizenship and governance,  
central to which is discussions about reason and its place in society  
and thinking, the enlightenment was hardly unambiguous. With a phrase  
that resonates critically in cybernetic behaviourism, Adorno and  
Horkheimer write how the Enlightenment reifies human beings, treating  
them as Zentren von Verhaltensweisen ("centres of behaviour patterns"). 
[xi] Also HEXEN 2.0 enters into a dialectic of the enlightenment and  
deliberates its incessant self-destruction, as Adorno and Horkheimer  
put it; a destruction that is undertaken in order to show how reason  
in the post-war era had failed historically, yet how it must  
nonetheless be pursued in order to guarantee social freedoms.

At the same time as philosophy was considered the only agent potent  
enough to precipitate a rapid, all-encompassing revolution, the  
optimism of Enlightenment philosophers was often legitimised by  
Utilitarian views.[xii] The practical task of helping humanity to  
become humanity, through the eradication of illness, poverty,  
ignorance, etc., and social history could be transformed through  
political, industrial and agricultural revolutions. Moreover,  
utilitarianism rejects the ranking of (moral) value according to a  
priori criteria in favour of the equal validity of each subject's  
search for happiness and pleasure. What makes Treister a faithful  
pupil of the enlightenment is the simple usefulness of the tarots in  
relation to her reading of material history. She turns enlightenment  
principles of utilitarianism and equal validity into epistemological  
principles by assuming that 1) if it is applicable, it is legitimate,  
and 2) don't moralise, don't pathologise. In order to make technology- 
whether computer, diagram, concept, drug or weapon-work in the  
interest of freedom, we must approach it without prejudice, and  
without a rationalist concept of rationality.

The historian Jonathan Israel distinguishes what he calls a radical  
enlightenment, thereby establishing a dialectic between moderate and  
revolutionary Enlightenment movements. To Israel, the revolutionary  
tendency represents a process of improving human existence by making  
society secular, tolerant, equal and democratic, and by extending  
reason to transform basic principles of education, legislation,  
international relations and colonial affairs. On crucial points  
regarding human rights, democracy and the role of the church, the  
radical tendency opposes moderate enlighteners such as Rousseau and  
Kant-the reformers who famously set their mark on modern civil society.

Israel talks about the instability of Enlightenment:

The Enlightenment's idea of progress, then, was invariably conceived  
as being "philosophical," a revolution of the mind. But it was  
undoubtedly economic, technological, political, medical, and  
administrative as well, in addition to being legal, moral, educational  
and aesthetic. Enlightenment "progress" was thus very wide-ranging and  
multi-faceted. Moreover, it was also inherently unstable (...) For it  
is apparent that Enlightenment progress could take specifically  
Christian, Deist, or atheistic forms; it could be conceived as  
endorsing or opposing the existing order of society, as being  
reversible or irreversible, God-ordained or purely natural.[xiii]

To Israel, enlightenment progress is all in the mind, as it were, as  
he argues that it was primarily an intellectual revolution before it  
manifested itself as an actual one in 1789.

Israel places particular emphasis on Spinoza as a founding figure of  
the radical enlightenment because the latter creates a sharper  
opposition between philosophy and theology, than do other  
philosophers, seeing organised religion as political deception.[xiv]  
In Spinoza's one-substance doctrine, body and soul, matter and mind  
are "one single substance viewed under different aspects" that  
essentially have to do with processes of corporeal organisation-again,  
the hexis that animates bodies, and our understanding of them, by  
allowing for a unifying perspective on their articulations.[xv] Thus  
Spinoza's materialist metaphysics concludes that everything that  
exists is matter and that God and the universe are the same. With  
this, Israel writes, Spinoza extends a Radical Enlightenment  
"metaphysically, politically, and as regards man's highest good."[xvi]  
One-substance enlightenment excludes all miracles and invokes "reason  
as the sole guide in human life, jettisoning tradition."[xvii]

A fundamental radical enlightenment impulse in Treister can be  
detected in the attempt to bring life back into reason through the  
encyclopedic consideration of everything existing; a reason that has  
not been formalised and instrumentalised and whose goals therefore  
hasn't become illusory. Maybe this reason appears to us as strangely  
bent, as it is conditioned by the experimental moment's momentary  
unity of pleasure, idea and representation. This may be because it is  
a meeting with another enlightenment than the one we got, of capital  
and control. Instead, from the point of view of a radical  
enlightenment, we are offered a total glimpse of a world in which  
tensional motions allow for different bodies to enter freely into  
composition with one another.

Lars Bang Larsen  2011

Notes:

[i] C.N. Cantor and M.J.S. Hodge: "Introduction: Major themes in the  
development of ether theories from the ancients to 1900," in: Cantor  
and Hodge: Conceptions of Ether. Studies in the History of Ether  
Theories 1740-1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1981, 6.

[ii] Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books, New York  
1979 (1975), 140.

[iii] Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow. Vintage Books, London 2000  
(1973), 49.

[iv] Steve J. Heims: The Cybernetics Group. MIT Press, Massachusetts  
1991, 15.

[v] Op.cit., 29.

[vi] Op.cit., 30.

[vii] http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/ 
NBIC_report.pdf, xii

[viii] Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain: Acid Dreams. The Complete  
Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond. Grove Press,  
New York, 1985, xxiii.

[ix] 52

[x] Cf. Groys, Hagemeister and von der Heiden (eds.): Die Neue  
Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20.  
Jahrhunderts. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2005.

[xi] Adorno and Horkheimer, 93.

[xii] Israel: A Revolution of the Mind. Radical Enlightenment and the  
Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2010), 53.

[xiii] Op.cit., 8.

[xiv] Op.cit., 2.

[xv] Op.cit.

[xvi] Op.cit., 2. Deleuze discusses univocity in Logic of Sense and  
Difference and Repetition in relation to his canon of univocal  
philosophers Ð Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Alliez puts it this  
way, "Opening up thought to constituent power, Spinoza is our  
contemporary by virtue of his refusal of any dialectical dimension  
that would aim at the (utopian or historical) reconciliation of the  
real." (Alliez, op.cit., 23)

[xvii] Op.cit., 19.



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