The Indiscipline of Protest

There have been at least two great intellectual failures in the last hundred years - the first is Marxism-Leninism and the second has been the liberal rejection of some of the central insights of the Marxists.

Class But Not As We Know It, Jim

This is not to praise Marxism except as an analytical tool under defined conditions because Marxism is, fundamentally, a poor guide to our human condition. Despite its alleged materialism, it is an idealist philosophy which has been quite historically effective for seizing power. But idealism is intellectually sanctioned lying about the world. Marxism is Hegelian which, in turn, is an historicism derived from the Western Christian tradition which, in turn and philosophically, is ultimately an adaptation of Platonism.

The trajectory from Plato's Cave to the Gulag has been well if simplistically argued by others but the summary is that this Western tradition of idealism is ultimately religious and 'spiritual' and that it can kill when brooked. But the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water in at least two respects. We have forgotten Marx' and Engels' insights that politics and culture derive intimately from economic conditions and that, though each person is greater than his class, there are class interests in politics.

Modern liberal democracy has tried to eliminate the language of class because it is not convenient for its preferred model of professionals organising functional coalitions of special interests and lobbies to share out the benefits of growth - but when growth falters, then Marx becomes analytically relevant.

Where Should We Be Looking

For this reason, in trying to understand what might develop out of the continuing economic crisis, we have to return both to theory and to what is happening where we are not looking - much as in 1910, we might have been wise not to ignore intellectuals in Zurich or school teachers in Bavaria. We should be studying not the machinations of the ideologues of the future (that is the job of the security services) but what they are saying that resonates with those who are either resentful of the current order of things or who are suffering and have the energy to do something about it.

It is that last clause that matters 'who 'have the energy to do something about it' - because there are an awful lot of resentful older middle class people, intellectuals and poor and vulnerable people who sit in their armchairs or on their sofas and have neither will nor ability to act. Liberal democratic hegemony (indeed, all hegemonies) ultimately relies on inaction - that moan in the pub, grumble in front of the TV, meaningless letter to The Times, rant in a Facebook comment. None of this morphs into organisation or action. It is the 'art of being ruled' (Wyndham Lewis' phrase).

In this context, the Occupy Movement, the hackers of LulzSec and the Anonymous operation both fascinated and appalled the establishment some years ago. It alternately tried to contain them within their laws and infiltrate them with progressive rhetoric or secret policemen (the Tsarist model). In the end, these 'protest movements' seem to have collapsed of their own volition, achieving very little.

Who Are These People?

But who were these failed protestors as a class? Not who was behind the 'attacks' or 'occupations' (some might as easily be provocations by the establishment as genuine acts of revolt) but who was participating not only in 'new' models of political action but in confused riots as states weakened? We have written elsewhere about the new anarchism but it is the class base of this movement that interests us here - and further investigation suggests that we were not seeing something new but something very old, the blockage of the aspirations of an educated young by the failed old.

This was a movement of graduates and not of workers (though there is a separate union-driven public sector defence movement whose self interest is so apparent that even middle class liberals can resent their claims) and of persons who are 'cleverer' than their parents. We get back to Marx. As in the print revolution of the 1500s, a revolution in communications has created a new technological and economic structure where value has shifted from one generation to another but where the necessary political or cultural change is lagging.

It is an old theme of these postings. The new technologies are not so much removing the ability of intermediaries to create value for themselves out of their oligarchical control of knowledge (the professionals, if you like) but are making intermediaries of all sorts potentially wholly redundant.

Paul Mason's Analysis

The young who know things the old do not know, including the absurdity of many of the rules designed to hold the old system together, were starting to use new technologies to combine and protest in ways that were entirely new. Their failures hide the fact that methods may have failed but the intent and the revolutionary potential for technology remain. A February 2011 analysis by Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight gave a number of reasons why this needed to be understood and, to a degree, embraced if we are to transit from one world to another without repression and killing. This is our gloss on that work after four years had passed.

• Young graduate women are emerging who are not stuck in the specific feminist resentments of the older generation but simply get on with practical organisation in their own interest and what they believe to be right. Mason was right that educated women were at the core of protest but what is interesting to observe since his analysis is that the 'feminisation' of protest, conducted in 'feminist' language has developed a counter-reaction from young males not in terms of reactionary politics but political disinterest, a sort of 'why bother?'


• Ideological formulations are dead as organising principles. There will be Marxists, conspiracy theorists, faith-based loons, environmentalists and liberals but none of them can control a propaganda process or impose an organisational model that can stifle internal dissent or insists on a 'line' to assert political discipline. The very fact of seven party leaders with different interests and ideologies sitting in a row on TV last night (in the UK) to present their wares to the public when only two realistically represented the possible ideology of governance for the next five years (and both of those agree on more than they disagree) tells you something about the emergence of hyper-real politics disconnected from the actual levers of power.


• An international 'elite' of protesters seemed to be emerging in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 'crash'. They operated quasi-professionally across borders or supplied technical skills across a borderless internet. This is an analogue with the intellectual diaspora dissidents who fuelled the rise of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism. Unfortunately, it became clearer that their history was not only one of political development a decade before (that is, they were ideologues exploiting a situation rather than emergent from the situation) but that a proportion of them were trained and managed during the Arab Spring by State actors seeking easy wins over rival States.


• The central economic issue remains State and personal debt at a time of lack of employment opportunity. The protests might rapidly disappear with job creation or free education and debt forgiveness but States are in no position to deliver these during the current crisis. The resentments of the young are real but it is not being expressed in revolutionary politics but in evolutionary democratic politics if at all. The real impulse here seems not to be engagement but gritting teeth, getting on with the job and waiting for a righteous revenge when the old codgers start to die off and inflation transfers wealth from the old to the young as recovery gets under way. It may be easier to get on a boat and plane and find a new home than stay in the old one and be left with the burden of paying for the profligacy of parents. Many young people are just voting with their feet.


• If this problem of a generation without prospects and with old codgers getting in the way is causing difficulties in the West, then it is boiling up to violent proportions in the many countries where there is now a massive demographic bulge of frustrated urban young. And yet this explosive material which might have been assumed to have been progressive because it was young, now turns it to be just as likely to be traditionalist, nationalist and even fascistic when it decides to get off its behind and do something. It is not just that ISIS and other insurgencies are fuelled by the young but that a 'fascist' Maidan 3 lurks around the corner and that the student leaders of the Hong Kong revolt are not modern secular atheists but as likely to be Christians with a hot line to the local CIA man.


• Organised labour is pretty well bankrupt as a revolutionary force. It has been a conservative force against 'clercs' (socialists) since the 1940s but it has degenerated further into being representative largely of those who are already ensconced within the State since the 1980s (in the UK) - a truly conservative interest at this time. Yes, there is a slow, steady movement by which a new generation of trades unionists (including a strong feminist element linked to the low paid private and public sectors) is reasserting their position on the centre-left but this is happening just as the official centre-left is beginning to crumble under the burden of managing austerity-lite because of the trap it has got into as the primary promoter of 'capitalism with a human face'. 

As for protest as 'fun', this should not be underestimated because contemporary protest seemed to permit people to 'take a day off' and join a camp. There is a history of carnival and, of course, situationist theory to fall back on, quite consciously so amongst urban anarchists. But four years on, the fun has gone out of protest - in the non-Western world, it is clear that people can get killed and, in the West, the magistrates are minded to take a dim view of carnival that destroys property

The educated young activist now has a better understanding of power relations than his forebears and has learned a lot since 2008. Most of it has been a repetition of the lesson of the 2003 Iraq protests - that the system is not responsive and will do anything to ensure its own survival, including violate whatever human rights are to hand if necessary.

The alternative is a level of commitment to organisation and discipline that just does not seem to be worth the effort compared to having fun, mating and building tradeable skills for the future. The young do not run on hope any more but on manipulative skills as effective as those of their opponents - it is just that they are choosing to re-direct those skills now to the game of life rather than political change.

There are mobilising exceptions - such as the Scottish Referendum - but the exceptions point up the problem: elites have to concede the opportunity for change. The moment cannot be seized independently. There is no ideological movement seeking to mobilise the masses for change, just minorities of 'activists' ducking and diving between methodologies and compromising with the very system of power they claim to despise.

Internal Contradictions

The fluidity and lack of ideology is the central weakness in the street. Occupy events proved weaker on the ground than they might have been because they attracted every type of conspiracy nut, weak-minded New Ager and middle class narcissist looking for self-expression. It also brings us back to class because young activists are driven by some understanding of power but not by allegiance to class or, bluntly, any real comprehension of economics.

The situationism in contemporary revolt is there for all to see. I am certainly not saying that the young should adopt Marxist models for success, quite the contrary since the end result would be bureaucratism, authoritarianism and soullessness, but there are issues here of organisation. We are only suggesting, by referring to Marx, that this is, despite its lack of self awareness, a form of class action because it is based, despite itself, fundamentally on economics and on technological changes to the means of production and that this leads to some interesting 'internal contradictions'. The protestors rarely seemed to understand their own condition - they could soon become manipulable mobs.

The intellectual base for rejecting Marxism as anything more than analytical tool is well summarised in a quotation from a French intellectual that Mason offered. Foucault advised Deleuze:

We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation [a nod to Marx], and, to this day [second half of the twentieth century], we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power.

The problem of organisation is a profound one because the current model of power relations only offers inclusion within liberal democratic coalition-building or the sort of bureaucratic organisational ability that allowed socialists to out-manouevre the anarchists between 1910 and 1940.

This is at the very heart of the debates already current in the British trades union movement at the turn of this century. The decision to go the way of a dogged turning around of the official Left (which has nothing much to say to the wider population as we can see in the lack of enthusiasm for Ed Miliband the front man of the movement) rather than recreate a socialist-labour movement to challenge capitalism was inevitable under such conditions. The Labour Movement might effectively and ideologically 'run' the next British Government and yet, while many individuals will benefit in the short term, nothing will have fundamentally changed at the end of their Party's' term of office. The objective conditions for change are simply not present.

The New Anarchism?

The logic of recent protest was different from that of the 'insider' approach but it is was soon very unclear how it could 'organise' anything at all. The fundamental self interest of the young and the Darwinian struggle between memes within that generation suggest that their primary tools are little more than their effect on the market (the rhetoric of action) and withdrawal from the law.

By withdrawal from the law, I mean not lawlessness but something entirely different and potentially more dangerous to the system - forcing the elite to acknowledge that its authoritarianism is unenforceable in any practical sense. The internet language of 'work-arounds' when systems fail springs to mind. But it still requires courage and involves risk in dealing with a system that likes to make examples of people and frighten the rest by publicising their exemplary law enforcement actions.

Solidarity is required to resist the tactic of control through exemplary fear. The fate of recreational drug users provides the template for the failure of an element in the community to challenge their masters through evidence-based analysis and organisation. The protests of 2011, we were told by Mason, were based on 'autonomy' and personal freedom within a democratic framework and (self-evidently) on opposition to state-protected special interests such as Wall Street and the finance markets. But this was the autonomous behaviour of very few people.

Four years on, nothing (and we mean nothing) had changed in regard to those ultimate power relations. Where the agenda had changed (as in the tax avoidance campaigning), it turns out that the prime beneficiary of increased taxes was only indirectly the people - the prime beneficiary was to be the State in its fight to deal with deficits and maintain social cohesion and its war machine.

This is where things start to get confused because if Anonymous and libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, it is also clear that the Greek riots around the same time (2011) were also about preserving an economic system that was socialist in the worst sense - corrupt at every level including the level of the working classes themselves.

Syriza has proved to be far more interesting since then, offering perhaps the opportunity to structure an anti-corrupt anti-austerity model but it has had to do so by taking on the Goliath of the Franco-German European Project as a David looking for a Deus ex Machina to emerge out of the hearts of stern-faced Teutons and the opportunists in Moscow. This is David without a catapult.

The young Italians coming to London to escape local corruption are in direct class opposition to the public service workers at home expecting to be feather-bedded for life. Anonymous was with the first and Occupy was increasingly representing the last. This was an internal contradiction within the Western protests that was never resolved, any more than the contradiction was resolved between young liberal middle class liberals in Tahrir Square and young and hungry working class Islamists wanting bread and wives.

Conservative Welfarism And Personal Autonomy

On the one side, hackers, anarcho-libertarians and situationists and, on the other, a special interest socialistic coalition of state workers, liberals and communitarians. On the one side, bourgeois liberals wanting a comfortable freedom and, on the other, traditionalists wanting a legal system and socio-economic structure based on Iron Age texts. These are very different movements and they cannot work long together. The 'neo-socialists', for example, tried appealing to the police by saying that they were protesting to protect their pensions (and making headway with that argument), while the libertarians were wondering what the police were doing there anyway.

The State also needs economic growth and surplus capital to impose law and order. Reducing the need for law and order to its core becomes necessary - and this is why we now have a serious public debate on the treatment of sex workers and the war on drugs. Scarce resources were looking at solving the wrong problems - social cohesion and warlord organised crime are now more of a threat than the pleasures of layabouts. There is some complex intellectual negotiation going here - between justification for tax expenditure on guns and butter, about what constitutes threat to the people and what constitutes threats to the State and about public intrusion into private life.

States & Protest

In both the West and the emerging world, it is likely that States and foreign powers quickly started to identify elite operatives in protest networks and became busy in not merely tracking but 'turning' and infiltrating them. Some of the operatives are often well-heeled and not representative of most of the young by any means - state funds can permit other new entrants to rise rapidly. There is also a rather sinister potential turn to events that the more naive activists may not see. As we noted above, State bureaucrats may see protesters as allies in bringing the market to heel and protecting the tax base for precisely the sort of activities that Anonymous was set on exposing.

We noted this as a possibility three or four years ago and the populist assault on HSBC suggests that we were right - and there is more to come. Radicals are easily diverted into a global rights and anti-corporate agenda that neuters any serious opportunity for changes in the structures of power at home and helps to extend markets for domestic corporations. We predicted that an alliance with liberal NGO-based coalitions might be rather convenient for authority when faced by the demands of finance capital so that the heirs of the Occupy and Anonymous movements might become useful in shifting the terms of political trade back towards auctoritas. And this is what was to transpire.

But, yet another issue identified at that time for the protest movements is one already well identified in the mainstream media ... er, what do they actually want? The 'internal contradiction' here is that much of the rhetoric is anti-State and yet jobs and free education can only be provided by a strong State with a decent tax base. Here we have another possible convergence of State and liberal aspirations at the expense of personal autonomy and libertarianism.

Liberty or Jobs?

In both New York and London, the Occupy protesters appeared to be targeting finance capital rather than government and to be drifting from the territory of Anonymous (which emphasised state action as generally 'wrong') to territory associated with socialism and social liberalism (more state is needed). This internal contradiction is profound, mirroring that between anarchism and socialism in the late nineteenth century. It represents the difference between left-libertarian ideology and the self interest of the coalition of the vulnerable threatened with penury by the current crisis. We certainly saw libertarians moving away from the British Occupy Movement as it fell into the hands of the traditional Left (not helped by an Archbishop backing it).

The real reason we are in economic crisis is not 'imperialism' (which is unwieldy and expensive but probably pays its way in market access and access to resources) but the massively greater social spending and job creation programmes of social liberal states without the investment in infrastructure to support it. When Anonymous strikes at US behaviour in Iraq, it is striking at the State as both imperialist and liberal capitalist (including its size and welfare basis) whereas when Occupy protesters seize territory, they eventually want the State to remain big but do the 'right thing' i.e. give them economic prospects and security. But States do not do the right thing. They never do the right thing. They exist to exist and aggrandise power. This is a lesson the Left should have learned from 1917.

Anarcho-Libertarianism or Neo-Socialism?

This internal contradiction is so profound because it is about whether a new generation will be led by neo-socialists wanting to over-turn capitalism by means of the State or anarcho-libertarians wanting to get the State out of the market and stop supporting big capitalists so that communal self-organisation can take place in 'safe space'. Occupy people reluctantly vote Labour or Democrat (or possibly Green) but Anonymous people probably don't bother to vote at all. Anonymous may be the wiser when faced with rule by a Clinton or a Milliband ... The unpredictability of things lies in another point made by Mason back in 2012 - that there are a multiplicity of narratives from which both the young and dissatisfied older citizens can draw. Fundamental world views do not change but the expression of those views can change very rapidly under the influence of the internet. Support or withdrawal of support from causes no longer takes place within a narrative of 'solidarity' or 'loyalty' but one of 'truth' or 'effectiveness'.

This is why older generation liberals are confused and are becoming reactionary. There is now no fixed feminist, black or gay narrative any more than there is a nationalist or working class narrative. There is just 'my' or 'our' narrative according to who I am or to the interest of my adoptive tribe. Constant self development and neo-tribalism mean enormous adaptability and flexibility but they also mean difficulty in pinning people down to organised collective action as opposed to participation in an action organised by others from which they may withdraw at a moment's notice. In this struggle between modes of resistance, nothing is as yet predictable. Church, unions, police and military may join the protesters for a neo-socialist solution or States may have to adapt to situational anarchism by reducing their scope and being better at what they do. Either is possible. We are in flux.

Stephen Alexander on Sex and Death - The Treadwell's Papers I & II (2010)

[This was privately circulated in late November 2010. Some of the (unattributed) comments are added below. There have been some marginal editorial changes. Stephen Alexander has since become a friend but I think it would lack integrity to change the text for that reason. For his own view on things go to his regular blog at Torpedo the Ark ]

I put my book reviews up on GoodReads - www.GoodReads.com - but, sometimes, I find that a book is not there, usually because the publisher is small and specialist and has not entered into that great marketing machine known as the Internet. In this case, there was no entry but it seemed a shame not to comment.

Small publishing enterprises should be encouraged especially if they are experimental. That is not to stay that their works should not receive the same level of rigorous criticism as bigger publishers but it is better to be criticised and noticed than just be ignored.

Treadwells is a bookshop and esoteric salon, with a well attended lecture series, in London's Covent Garden [now moved to Store Street]. It is not a publisher. However, in 2005 and in 2006, it invited Stephen Alexander to give two sets of lectures, first on sex and then on death, in an attempt to build a bridge between the hard edge of continental philosophy and neo-paganism.

These papers were edited and then published as The Treadwell's Papers Volumes I and II (in fact, one paperback) earlier this year by Blind Cupid Press.

The experiment is not a complete success as we will see but it was an important and worthy attempt to bring some intellectual rigour to the consideration of what is going on in the world of the new religions and a chance for that world to hear from one intellectual engaged deeply with the likes of Nietzsche and Foucault.

The two sets of lectures must be treated separately because sexuality is far more central (even when some practitioners go into a state of denial about this) to most neo-pagan lives than death - although the idea of natural cycles and (in some traditions) return is a powerful theme in pagan thought.

However, we must make one criticism from the beginning that applies to both books - Stephen Alexander's not entirely explained obsession with DH Lawrence whose writings he privileges in a way that they simply cannot bear.

DH Lawrence is an important figure in English literary history and in understanding English culture but he was not a philosopher. In fact, he was often a hysteric - much like Bataille, another writer referred to by Alexander, or Artaud - and his own thinking on sex and death is of merely antiquarian interest, much like that of, say, HG Wells on society.

This obsession with Lawrence and his works is a barrier to understanding because, too often, especially in the second volume on death, this paragon of highly intelligent male sexual hysteria is taken not as an example (rightly in some places) but as a guide. He is not. This detracts from the books.

Sex/Magic

The Sex/Magic Volume is much superior to the succeeding one on death, in part because Alexander really does contest with vigour some of the wishy-washy aspects of neo-pagan mentality on the latter's ground.

He is devastatingly right about the capture of a part of witchcraft by the Jewish matriarchalism of Starhawk and the turning of sexuality into that sort of tolerance that tut-tuts sexual beings into traditional monogamy and right behaviour by the back door. Starhawk clearly fulfils some social need but whatever she claims to be, she is not truly 'paganus'.

I have decided not to waste time on the distracting Laurentian arguments but what Alexander does with some success is point to the tendency of paganism to owe too much to the culture from which it is seeking to rebel, especially in regard to that culture's dualism, especially male/female dualism.

The history of the modern pagan revolt against Judaeo-Christianity is not a simple break but a series of shuddering lurches where the advanced guard leaves a substantial conservative force behind.

Crowley now looks increasingly nineteenth century and Thelema reaches a Typhonian high point in a man, Kenneth Grant, whose attitude to the sexual is still secretive and dualist. Gardner too increasingly appears to be carrying out in ritual the coded sexual tensions of the first half of the twentieth century.

Alexander's service is a cruel one here but a necessary one. Using Nietzsche as his type-philosopher (a philosopher scarcely considered by the 'greats' of the neo-pagan revolution though much earlier than they), he shows that a great deal of popular neo-paganism is not as liberatory as it thinks it is - it has revolted against one form of essentialism only to create new forms that have not moved very far from Plato.

Of course, existentialism is a damned hard school and it seems unfair to deprive neo-pagans, in their own heartland, of solace in the essential. This is an argument that applies equally to the Christian who may be embedded in philosophical nonsense but who gains such solace that only the hardest curmudgeon would deny their faith, hope and charity when they are not persecuting others.

But if you ask a continental philosopher into your inner sanctum, don't expect him to be anything other than he is. The removal of the binary approach to constructing our social reality has been revolutionary to the point that, now, anyone who persists in binary thought is either a 'fool' (in fact, simply uneducated) or a 'knave' (wilfully authoritarian or manipulative of the dead weight of binary thinking at the heart of our current social reality).

Good/evil, male/female, nature/nurture, mind/body, black/white and so on have been embedded in our thinking as much as top/down - that there is good, evil, male, female, mind, body etcet. is unanswerable but that there is some clear dividing line between categories that is not contingent and circumstantial is now very contestable.

The tradition within neo-paganism (though gnosticism too is fundamentally essentialist) that comes closest to this thinking is the gnostic while neo-paganism still moves closer towards continental philosophy than any other Western religion (the Eastern religions actually influenced continental philosophy and are a different kettle of fish).

Shorn of Lawrence, Alexander is definitely worth reading and insightful on sex and the magical, relying on Foucault as much as Nietzsche. On sex, he offers a short intellectual boot camp for neo-pagans that they will either get or not get and, if they get it, will move them sharply on from many traditional reconstructionist forms.

There is not space here to critique all six lectures but, after the introductory talk, Alexander goes on to cover masturbatory fantasy (where he falls into his own traditionalist trap in the end), the positive liberatory idea of 'cunt' (where he provides a devastating account of the evil of female genital mutilation that, in itself, rather knocks sideways any romantic view of indigenous cultures), the meaning of anal sex, a subversive view of nakedness in witchcraft (which is worth reading alongside Carr-Gomm's recent review of nakedness in our culture) and an interesting view of the masochistic and fetishistic aspects of ritual in Wicca.

I do not always agree with his analyses. Alexander gets so bound up with his argument that he comes out as a sort of moraliser for a particular model of Foucauldian anarchy that subverts itself into a surprising acceptance of a certain balance in favour of order.

Indeed, he is often philosophically confused and the personal does seem to take over ... he plays the magus to a vulnerable audience at such times, less here than in the second book, in a way that I find just a tad suspicious. Does he really believe all this or is he just playing?

However, the manipulation and absurdities of his position are tolerable because his insights are good. If you keep your wits about you and read him without allowing the magician's misdirection and sleight of mind to glamour you into futile shock or absurd acceptance, you will get a great deal out of this series of lectures.

In summary, his critique of modern neo-paganism stands up and is well-argued - even if I, for one, see no reason why the kinder and more tolerant delusions of these new religions should not continue to be encouraged as far more beneficent than Judaeo-Christian miserabilism.

However, it is this kindness and tolerance that, towards the end, Alexander seems to want (or perhaps not want but be led by his logic) to undermine with an attitude to the sexual that will appear not liberatory but nihilistic. Some kind of implied psychic anger starts to appear that obviates the claim to philosophy and this becomes more obvious in the second volume.

Thanatology

This second volume, on the other hand, was a disappointing series of lectures not only because of the constant references to Lawrence (which became simply tiresome after a while) but because it just did not work philosophically - so much of it was blind assertion with very little connection to specific neo-pagan concerns (quite unlike the 2005 series).

At the end of the 2005 Papers, Alexander seemed to be particularly concerned to attack religious fascism, indeed the fascistic mentality altogether, but in 2006, his ruminations on death contain all the hysterical despair of the sort of late nineteenth century or early twentieth century intellectual ripe for the blood lust of ... yes, fascism.

Thanatology starts with a remarkably black (to most people) vision of existence. Personally, I not only get this but have written on it and have moved on from it but Alexander does not seem to be able to move on at all.

His brilliant (at this point) account of our place in Existence reminds one of Thomas Ligotti's stories, which are one up in existential darkness from HP Lovecraft, and the actual existential joy in the Nietzschean 'ubermensch' is often expressed as if he does not fully understand it himself.

He sounds so black (not entirely without philosophical justification) that you wonder whether it was an act of cruelty to perpetrate this 'dark night of the soul' on a bunch of pagan innocents at the first lecture. Still, it is smart stuff and the book really only declines after this point.

Thanatology goes on to cover Heidegger's concept of 'Da-Sein' (badly, I think, with the same obsessive darkness of the introductory lecture), an unpersuasive but genuinely stimulating discussion of the relationship between sex and death (though he can sound a bit like Baudelaire after a particularly rough night out), a view on suicide that goes beyond private rights (where I stand) to such an espousal of the death instinct that even I might have him removed from society for fear of his effect on the temporarily disturbed young - and a section on human sacrifice which takes him into the realm of nihilistic evil.

It is his rather weak (in historical terms which seems to owe more to Frazer than any serious reading of Aztec culture) lecture on sacrifice where he lost me - and quite profoundly.

From his apparent liberatory anti-fascist stance in Book I, his desire to show off as an intellectual has had him turn topsy-turvy and, it would seem, at least implicitly (pages 279-288), to espouse mass slaughter as a possible good in itself, not the sacrifice of oneself but the sacrifice of others for some grander narrative.

Bloody hell! Literally ... or is he simply telling us what Nietzsche, Lawrence and Bataille have thought? It is not entirely clear ...

Finally, he moves on to Nietzsche's Death of God and a reinterpretation of Christ's Sacrifice which sounds all very good as a literary exercise (which is how perhaps we should see this Second Book) but which is undermined by a very simple fact on which Heidegger would have put him right - er, Stephen, we don't get up again when we die.

Neither do all those slaughtered victims ... nor the temporarily young disturbed person who kills themselves (though the case of Ellen West remains a corrective to excessive determination to deny this private right). Sex is different which is why he is on safer ground.

But even here, Foucault's death from AIDS, as much as you may try and re-clothe it in 'choice' by a man who tried to kill himself and had masochistic tendencies, the responsibility (unless you are a psychopath) for another's life if a child is born and the fact that a woman does tend to get dumped with the consequences, all suggest that the wilder shores of what I would term sub-existentialist nihilism move very close to an hysterical and disturbed attempt to acquire the attributes of psychopathy (without being psychopathic) as a form of self-death.

Logically, anyone who held many of the views in this second book for real as opposed to literary effect, who did rather than talked - and most intellectuals talk rather than do - would not only be dangerous to social order (which might be a good thing) but could be dangerous to their intimates and themselves (which is not).

Perhaps we might call this second book a prime representation of the 'Heliogabalus Complex' - the desire by troubled intellectuals who have no effect on the world to create a fantastic vision of that world in which all values are trans-valued not in order to make the world more true to itself but a reflection of their own thoughts.

It is the ultimate 'the personal is the political'. Such gloomy intellectuals always appear when things start spinning out of control and are always attracted to the esoteric and the occult precisely because these latter are often an 'absurd' attempt to re-make reality.

In fact, this elitist intellectualism is very dangerous - it is neither truly transhuman in the Nietzchean sense nor effective 'magic' (manipulation) and is only a partial description of reality.

Neo-paganism has arisen because of something greater than intellectual frustration and narcissism. It is as 'false' as every other faith-based system but it 'works' and does so under conditions of exceptional tolerance and community. It is pragmatically good until the day that it gets 'power' then it reverses its own polarity and becomes a problem. It is power, not truth (and here we are with Foucault) which is at issue.

I don't like Starhawk because she takes things too far towards the world of power (over minds). I suspect that Gardnerian and Thelemite models are already becoming sclerotic.

But the impulse to love and build community from below is an important one, one that defies Alexander's black vision of the universe, as not a truth (which it is not) but as a reality (which it is).

The value of continental philosophy lies in stripping away pretensions to truth. It is counter-productive if it positions Non-Truth, paradoxically, as Truth. We have not then progressed at all.

The fallacy of Western intellectualism is thus to seek truth when there is no truth that is not black - and to avoid dealing with realities which can never be 'truth' but which are created by ourselves out of mind and matter in different forms every second of every day in conjunction with billions of other people as useful to ourselves.

The only Truth in this context is scientific and based on pragmatic considerations of experiment and utility. The Western philosophical project should be to give up seeking truth beyond science, especially give up making the 'black' Truth into a reality as meaningless as that of religion.

The art is to know the darkness for what it is and to build pragmatic human-friendly realities regardless of this - and just see what happens.

This is exactly what real existentialism says - Nietzsche's myth of the Eternal Return as a kick up the backside to build the reality you want now, while Heidegger's engagement with Da-Sein is a positive engagement with reality without recourse to essentialist truths. You don't need a great deal more than that.

So this is the paradox of Alexander's work - he is still, despite everything, not merely trying to find out the Truth as Non-Truth but seeking to drive it outwards to others like any latter-day St. Augustine or Engels. He is in danger of being to Foucault what these gentlemen were to Christ and Marx. He should perhaps just ease up and go with the flow ...

But I am glad he wrote these lectures. I am glad they were published. Despite my criticisms, I think (if you are fairly strong-minded) you could profit greatly be reading what he has to say. It may take you to the edge but, if you do not do yourself in or leads legions to slaughter, you should come out of it a stronger person.

Comments in Response to Criticisms [November 2010]

A  

The mind that is totally dependent on language for experience is only half a mind. Just because something cannot be described or can only be approximated in language does not mean that it is not there only that a) it cannot be described or approximated and c) it can only be communicated analogically by reference to the possibility of someone else recognising that they may have had a similar non-linguistically describable experience.

This is the fundamental problem with language-based intellectualism. It is pragmatically effective in building social reality and in managing matter through technology but it is no guide to the experience of being and our raw relationship to Existence. As I say, the only binary that is not a mere contingent tool for building society is the binary between ourselves and Existence.

In ourselves, we are beyond binaries and only become binary in relation to others. The magic of love, spirituality and other raw emotions is that we move from binary into the apparently illusory state of unification.

It is illusory from the point of view of thought and society but thought is illusory from the point of view of experience so the unification is both a lie and a truth, neither one nor the other and certainly not 'binary'. Society is, similarly, both a truth and a lie and therefore not binary.

B

Even the indvidual and society are not binary (in relation to each other) because the individual is functionally constructed by society and society by the intervention by and struggle between individuals.

Ideology is the anti-human opposition to the individual at the extreme end of social reality - the creation of the half-minds of intellectuals - whereas 'unification' or the gnostic is the anti-social creation of integrated and individuated minds operating perhaps to the detriment of their own physical survival on occasions - and certainly to their wealth and status. One makes choices.

C
  
First Critic:  For starters, I dont think you can assume that your experience has any similarity to my experience without communication.

My Reply: I surmise with some small logic based on similarities not only of formal language but context and non-verbal communication - which is one of the roles of art. But I cannot 'know' anything, I can merely surmise and that surmise must be understood to be approximate only, a useful fiction based on probability, perhaps sometimes possibility.

D

I am reluctant to speak for Alexander beyond a certain point because it would be wrong to claim to express him better than himself. In essence, he appears to contrast the 'Starhawk' sexual-magical approach (as example) with Lawrence's somewhat desperately neurotic (and I think downright silly) male-hysterical objection to it in preference to straight bonking. He then surrounds this with all sorts of interpretative complexity that bears little relation to the act itself.

My view is somewhat cold and analytical. Masturbation is first and foremost a pleasure without meaning. Pleasures do not have to have meaning. He is certainly right that magical masturbation appears to represent philosophical nonsense - I would go further and say that the whole performance around it by Californian Wiccans, analogous to the nonsense of Neo-Tantra, is a back-handed compliment to Judaeo-Christian sexual repression by giving it more importance than it should have.

On the other hand as a) deliberate transgression in some contexts (though it is sad that it is necessary) and b) as an element in dynamic hormonal change in appropriate contexts (where it sits with a range of means including drugs and alcohol and whatever), then it is a 'tool for use'. People really should relax more about this sort of thing and stop imbuing natural and pleasurable and harmless acts with philosophical depth that they do not have.

On female genital mutilation, some things are just absurdly wrong and this is one. Anyone who argues such things is stuck up their own intellectual orifice.

Even Alexander who is well stuck up that moral orifice in Volume 2 on suicide and human sacrifice, gets it in Volume 1 - people are not objects at the service of ideas or theory and the only person permitted to mutilate themselves (and they are) are individuals free of pressure from other individuals and choosing to do so for their own sakes, as tools of individuation.

We romanticise indigenous tribalism and primitive societies for reasons that show the moral vacuum at the heart of much New Age thinking where the image or the simulacrum or the wish has replaced the reality. Alexander does a service here.

E 

Second Critic

The thing one has to bear in mind about Stephen Alexander, other than his strange obsession with D.H. Lawrence, is that a lot of the time he is being intentionally provocative and doesn't necessarily hold with the position he is espousing. He will often take a 'stance' with the intention of upsetting the apple carts, whether or not he personally holds with said position is another matter entirely.
 
I have not read the papers, though I did attend both lecture series in entirety. The audience were not the 'usual' Treadwell's audience... there were very few neo-pagans. Most of the audience being philosophy students/graduates/teachers with a smattering of occultists and one or two neo-pagans - the latter whom worked at the shop were almost there by default, one could say.
 
2005/6 is such a long time ago that I cannot, to be honest, recall much more than the mood and taste of those lectures... the actual content long since having been dragged screaming down to the abyss of my mind where it has no doubt been lunched on by a Deep One. 
 
Perhaps, I should pop along to Treads and get a copy of the book. It would be interesting to re-visit the material.
 
As for your critique, Tim. You do seem to have hit the nail on the head in many respects, most insightful, however without the transcripts I cannot comment on particulars.

To Which I Replied:  

Thanks for that insight. I guessed he was being provocative (after all, his disquisition in implicit favour of Aztec mass human sacrifice might have been regarded as deeply disturbed and attracted the attention of the security services) but you have to take what is presented in front of you and not assume that everything is to be treated as if it was ironic - there comes a point when being ironic is ironic and that way true philosophical madness lies The book is, I think, worth reading - not as a masterpiece (it is not) but as something that, DH Lawrence aside, helps one to clarify ones own position helpfully. Good on Treadwell's for publishing it.

And My Critic Clarifies:

One must also not forget that in many ways the old skool/original punk in Stephen Alexander is still alive and well and informs, to an extent, his approach to life, the universe and writing/giving lectures. There is that sense that his lectures, much like his life, are performance art.

To Which:

Is not everything in life?

And so:

True. Though not everyone fully embraces that fact, let alone relish it.

To Which:

Perhaps there should be Oscars for best performance in life, best personal style, best use of language ...

F: 

First Critic:

On Situated Gestalts, surely given that the brain is in part a pattern recognition (and pattern creation) instrument that finds (and generates) a signal amidst noise, art, for instance, is the creation of the encounter between an artist's creation and its perciever? In that, in the absense of an artist's narrative, no two people will percieve the same work of art (with the possible exception of some explicit literary works). The same is the case when we encounter something unexplained in life, and this is what I understand to be meant by a situated gestalt. Because of this no one actually experiences existance they experience the relation between existance and their own meaning generation. A meaning that may also ontologically transform what is experienced. Given the possibility that the meaning we find may correlate partly, or even entirely, with the actual signification of the experience (as opposed to its percieved significance), we can to some extent have a shared experience, but, as you say, we cannot know which element is the shared portion until we communicate linguistically (either directly in approximate description or indirectly in poetic analogue).

When we clarify a situated gestalt with approximate description we binarize it, if it cannot be classically binarized we use poetry. But even poetic language parasites off of linguistic meaning, so in fact is still binarized at a deeper level isn't it? If I compare you to a rose, to understand that you have to have a binary 'rose / not-rose' concept, in order to know what a 'rose' is. Therefore we can't have a shared experience outside of binary language. Am not sure what you meant by context in terms of meaning, if you mean inference (as in 'as a writer he was unsurpassed in his emulation') even thats binary in the sence of it being related to what it excludes. So I would agree that anything involving another person generates duality, by virtue of our binary seperation from that which we both refer to and the parallel seperation with that person.

So perhaps only in unity can we have non-duality, but here you say we as ourselves have this inner unity, which I would question. After all we are nothing more than a bundle of sensations and desires held together by some mysterious 'I'. Internally we have many binary relations, and in part unify them and thus create ourselves as a unity through language. We only have to see how a non linguistic animal chases its own tail to realise that. You then romantically assume 'love' generates a sense of unity, when all it really involves is attachment (a binary between two subjects) and at best an imaginative identification.

So I would deny, from this perspective, that we ever experience unity and only ever experience relation. Likewise we never experience existance only our falsification (and perhaps modification) of it. All our experience of the 'ground reality' is a conceptually mediated illusion to a large extent and our concepts are based on binary language. Nothing is unmediated. 
 
Thats the view from the problem side of the hill. From the other side of the hill, I think we can be aware of unity and non-duality. But I'll return to this when I've got round the hill and rebooted my brain on a new program, in a bit.

Note, by meaning I understand X=Y, so you can have true meaning or actual signification (2+3=5) , false meaning (2+3=4) or personal meaning or significance (2+3=23).

Note 2, by love I of course mean that delusion of unity that comforts us in our essential alienation and is rooted in our self-love unconsciously transfered onto another or imagined.

After all, even on a biological level its been found that the more closely related organisms are to each other the stronger will be their desire to mate (peaking with identical twins), and its only by virtue of inverse imprinting in early development that animals don't mate with their relatives or same sex (neither of which are guaranteed :))))

 Perhaps the essence of unity is to be found in contradiction? In the previous perspective I was seeing things in terms of rational generalisation (which we need to in order to be able to live and on which language itself is based). But we also experience things in the particular. The ultimate particular being the mysterious 'I'.

Every experience arguably has its own unique particularity which can not be compared with any other element of an experience. It's unique difference. We normally ignore this in people as it only heightens the realisation of our alienation as well as in events as it detracts from our generalised sense of meaning. But really difference and uniqueness may be our our only authentic point of unity, even 'sameness'.

Perhaps we can't truely love someone unless we can percieve their uniqueness, and can't achieve this till we have accepted out own uniqueness and existential isolation.

If we focus on the uniqueness of things instead of their generality we begin to see the world in a different way. While we can never escape the way language and thought generalizes the world for us, we can bracket that off to some extent and narrow in on the particular, which we can concieve of in virtue of relation to the 'I'.

In this particularizing view of the world we lose all sense of generalisation and logic. We can say that X = Y in terms of unique situation A and X = Z in terms of unique situation B, but also that Y does not eqaul Z in any general terms. We thus open up a para-logical realm in which contradictions and not 'realisations' are the essence of experience. Not that everything is contradictory and irrational, as that would be to return to generalisation, just that some things apply in the context of a particular and others don't. Thus in these terms everything possible (the universe) includes a full range of contradictions that in general rational terms would negate each other to nothing. Everything possible as they say really is Nothing. So my last statement above 'Nothing is unmediated' may be doubly true!
 
The particular is also unmediated because that is what stands out in experience, it only takes a single experience to experience the novel, but sameness requires an indefinite ammount of experience to affirm true identity (even though 'novelty' may constantly change). That is your awareness of particularity and novelty is constantly affirmed (and modified) where as generality and conclusive identity is always infinitely deferred till everything has been sampled (more experience may clarify the differentiation, you can experience red for the first time, then a second time, but eventually you may discover a finer differentiation of shades of red and so a new uniqueness which disrupts the sameness).

From this perspective we can say the 'ground reality' reference is he mysterious 'I' and novelty in experience, or difference. Which when generalised paralogically leads to the conclusion that 'ground reality' is Nothingness. Which may be why we ourselves experience the 'I' as a 'creative nothingness', because that's what everything is.

That's as far as I can go from this side of the hill, hampered as I am with the binaries of language and conceptual thought....

... note, a lot of delusional mysticism is based on the Platonic error of projecting generalised abstractions of illusory sameness, into some higher realm. Or by regarding the general rational view of the world is the reality instead of an illusion.

This doesn't deter from the instrumental value of reason of course nor the generation of approximate maps or models of reality, just our mistaking them for reality.

Second Critic 

 "... leads to the conclusion that 'ground reality' is Nothingness. Which may be why we ourselves experience the 'I' as a 'creative nothingness', because that's what everything is." Did you really have to jump through all those hoops to reach this conclusion? lol


My Reply

Well you were on a roll there with, in your customary fashion, the ability to hold contradictory ideas in seeming balance without turning a hair ...

... the duality you refer to is simply the fact that the 'other' (the person) is part of the Existence into which we are thrust and it is tautologous to create further binaries than the core one that I postulated (Da-Sein/Existence). These latter are illusory binaries in that they are simply constructed by Da-Sein (oneself thrust into a relationship with Existence) and the essential unknowability of Existence (which does not exist except in a relationship of Meaning to us and which only comes into Existence from Non-Existence as we engage with it).

The 'situated gestalt' is merely an attempt to give a linguistic explanation for this tension between the two categories in the original binary opposition where, though we can imagine half-states (hence our historical interest in after-lives and cosmic narratives and our current cultural fascination with zombies, vampires, frankensteinian monster and even sentient robots and aliens and so on), we find ourselves back to the point made in my review - that death is final and we are all on a road towards it.

Thus, Existence paradoxically also loses in its final victory over us by asserting its Non-Existence for us at the point of death. At that point, we do not exist and it does not exist either. The finality is not our loss only but the loss of everything.

The 'situated gestalt' is a very useful explanatory tool but it is the point at which thinking begins to embed itself in the human mind as binary thinking - the attempt to extend the original binary opposition so that the world might be manipulated until it goes too far and becomes, first, analytical philosophy and then, second, ideology, the degeneration of philosophy into a form of false socialised matter, the construction of this social reality as 'real' and, worse (since real is arguable, given the accepted working reality of Existence as science and shared manipulable reality), 'true' and even, in the most insane development of all, 'beautiful' and 'good'.

The unity exists in the original binary opposition and is momentary and fluid - a succession of unities - defined as unities against Existence where Existence is, ultimately, its own negation. Our unified moments exist within our consciousness where nothing else exists if it is outside that unitary moment. Existence is thus, as I have suggested, Non-Existence except where it is pragmatically used as techne or symbol by the unified moment that is the momentary Self in relation to the Existence that is Non-Existence, its own contradiction.

Thus 'love' is only a delusion when observed from outside in the world of Existence (which is Non-Existence so that any observed love cannot be existent) whereas it is not a delusion when experienced in the momentary unified moment that defies Existence. The momentary experience of unification at certain points in life are thus points that humanity both seeks out and fears because such points are necessarily denied by the social out of 'ressentiment' and fears of its disruptive effect on the stability of the 'fake' Existence we call 'society'.

Yet, those who have experienced such moments which are promiscuous in their subjects and situations are fully aware that the claim that such moments are illusory comes only from persons who live in a different type of illusion under conditions where the term illusory is so general as to define Existence itself - and so Non-Existence so that all is real and all is illusion and the terms are utterly meaningless. The moment is all ...

First Critic

Well, yes thats Heideggar's view, but it doesnt actually make sense particularly because its full of unwarranted assumptions.

For one it seems to be assuming unity of existance, which is probably not the case according to Physics, and it may be assuming unity of Self, depending how he defines Dasein (if he means the Subject its certainly not unified, if he just means the bare 'I' its unified in an odd way as there's nothing there to unify, just bare perception, and its also difficult to see how it does anything). But I'd say the notion that the Dasein creates Existance by engaging with Non-Existance is a bit odd, Physics has certainly shown otherwise (our engagement with the world does seem to create the phenomenal world of classical physics, but it doesnt create the underlying quantum reality, which certainly exists in the normal sense of the word), though I suppose if you swap 'Manifest' for 'Existance' it does make some sence, perhaps.

Likewise in this context 'death' can only be seen as transitional, a becoming unmanifest, what ever thats like, and what ever is unmanifest can become manifest in the same form within Physics, so I don't see it as final, critically transformative perhaps and final to a life if you give it any meaning or goal (which I don't). I think H gets really flaky when he starts talking about Existance in this way its a bit like some religious nut talking about 'heaven' only in reverse (the faith based postulation of a fundamental non-existance, rather than of some fundamental higher existance) and seems worse to me.

Everything else stated makes no sense in concrete terms, I suspect H was more than a little insane It even seems to be implying a kind of ontological Idealism which has long been refuted.

To Which I Replied

It does not assume unity of Existence (which is unknowable). It simply assumes the unity of unknowability in its aspect of all that is unknowable that we come up against as beings-in-the-world and which we call Existence, i.e. as being a unity to all intents and purposes as far as the conscious subject is concerned. If we knew the not-unity of the unity of Existence, then it would cease to be raw Existence and become some-thing instead of no-thing-in-particular that may or may not be No-Thing-At-All. That, I think, is unanswerable.

Physics shows us merely what is utile to us. It is 'true' but its truth is tautological - that is, we call it true because it works for us and can be perceived by us out of the raw material of Existence.

It is just the 'is-ness' of things to the degree that we can understand and make use of it but it is not all the 'is-ness' of Existence, much of which we clearly cannot know and may be beyond physics or may not. We do not know. The quantum stuff is covered by this as is any future model of the world that the human mind can cope with.

If Heidegger was insane, then I am insane - don't answer that!

First Critic

'is-ness' makes more sense than 'existence' But I'm not sure about this unity of unknowability, its an odd definition of unity.

I think Physics is a fairly accurate approximation of the 'is-ness' of existance, obviously not a complete description but a very close one.

To Which I Replied

It is the unity of all that cannot be knowingly divided ... you may not assume its division: that is an act of 'faith' and you may as well believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (which perhaps you do) in which case there is no arguing with you ... as for the last point, isness is isness, it cannot be approximated - to be close is not to be near at all. You can be as close as you like in your mind's eye but you are never 'there'in fact ... and cannot know where 'there' is in order to be adequately near enough to say that you are close with any meaning.

G:

Second Critic:  As regards your Existential fundamentalism... maybe we will get ya next time 'round.

Me: I'm as slippery an eel: I'd like to see you try ... Ha! I am a fundamentalist ... the FBI will now be on to me ...

Second Critic: Indeed, Tim, you ARE an existential fundamentalist... own it... and beg forgiveness..

Me: I never beg ... better to die on your feet than live on your knees ...

Second Critic: That's the spirit...

ENDS