Reviving Eliade for a Semiotics of the Sacred

For many proponents of a cognitive-evolutionary explanation for religion (and also many religionists in general!), religion is defined as system involving belief in a supernatural agent or agents. Here, the concept of “belief” is central and pre-supposed, the hinge on which the definition often rests.

If you have kept up with this blog for a while, it would not surprise you that something missing for me here in some of the mainstream or popular accounts of evolutionary psychology where religion is concerned—is the way in which an essentially “computational” understanding of the mind evades (whether intentionally or unintentionally) certain questions about meaning (buried in that convenient word "belief"). Whether or not it is the intention, the discussion of memes as “units” of cultural transmission makes it too easy to see meaning as objective, shirking the importance and role of subjectivity and embodiedness.

This is simplifying it, but many cognitive-evolutionary accounts trace religion back to animism. The perception of intentional or intelligent, but non-human or even non-creaturely, agents in one's environment.

I am deeply fascinated by cognitive science (that's why I protest so much!) However, animism (let alone religion) cannot only be explained by the attribution of agency to features of the environment. The focus on discrete “beings” or “entities” in evolutionary psychology seems to overlook the phenomenon, touched upon by contemplative philosophers of religion as well as phenomenologists of religion, whereby transcendent meaning is attributed to or intuited from certain features (both animate and inanimate) of the environment as humans interact with it. What cognitive module or evolutionary adaptation, one wonders, is responsible for Mircea Eliade’s “hierophany”, an apprehension of “the sacred” in which the actual “structure of the world” as apprehended by humans reveals transcendent principles?7 In The Sacred and the Profane, perception of sacred reality is not limited to sensing the presence of god or gods, or even any kind of sentient agency. Religious experience then is primarily about the creation of meaning (and not necessarily the transmission of meaning), well illustrated in Eliade’s comment about pastoral or rural societies wherein “the existence of the world itself “means” something.”8 While cognitive-evolutionary accounts of religion center on the action of the human brain, phenomenological accounts of religion center more on the “world”—but it is the world-as-experienced subjectively, so it is literally the action of the world on the subject (as well as subject-on-world). Yet it is not my intention to show that these two approaches disagree—in fact I want to explore how they could possibly complement each other, especially if other models of cognition are considered.

    In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade emphasizes that it is hierophany (perception of the sacred, an engagement with some dimension of ultimate reality) that allows a human subject to orient themselves within the world or the cosmos. This is quite a profound statement, as it is attaching the act of mapping the world and investing it with value to religious experience. There has been much debate over Eliade’s use of the concept of the sacred since his time, including many charges of his tendency to essentialize or universalize the sacred and/or posit the actual existence of an ultimate reality as something separate from human history. In this vein he has been criticized as a “crypto-theologian”—in other words, importing theological beliefs into his scholarship (cite Blum). But I read his definition of the sacred as essentially the subjective perception of an order of reality that sets up an opposition between itself and more normative or “mundane” modes of perception. This contradistinction is of immense, priceless value because it has a sort of grammatical or didactic nature— it ‘tells’ the subject something about existence. It is a rupture, a break in the flow of whatever mode of awareness dominates during the majority of the time. This rupture in both space and time (as perceived) allows an underlying structure to be “revealed”—and regardless of how the derivative revelations square empirically, the “sacred” is in the end a phenomenological category, not an ontological one. To me there is nothing faintly theological or even “essentialist” about this idea. Its value lies in the way it illustrates (perhaps poetically or metaphorically) the point that for anything to have meaning there has to be relation or comparison between at least two things. There can be no transcendent meaning inferred from apprehension of a completely homogenous world. For the world we live in daily to have meaning as a world, there must be “another world” beneath, behind, or hidden within it. For Eliade “the Sacred” is an “experience of the nonhomogeneity of space”, and so perennially provides this point of reference, this ‘other world.’9 With this reference point, the “profane” world is able to be defined and seen as a sort of privation—something other than sacred. In this way Eliade’s sacred is literally the source and index of all value, because its apprehension imparts or adjusts value to everything else.

    Thus, Eliade speaks of hierophanies as having a world-founding function. He writes, “the discovery or projection of a fixed point—the center—is equivalent to the creation of the world.”10 Yet this “center” that Eliade speaks of is not necessarily a spatial or geographical center (though it is definitely referenced in mythic and religious ideologies that place certain cities or locations at the center of the world, which he discusses). It is merely a conceptual anchor point that fastens the “profane” world to an ultimate reality that is essentially unclassifiable in terms of normal space and time. Of hierophany, Eliade writes: “The religious experience of the non-homogeneity of space is a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world...for it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation.”11 Additionally, hierophany is an experience which demands response—he gives the example of Moses taking off his shoes when apprehending the Burning Bush.12 This echoes similar conceptions of religion by philosophers, religion as “absolute responsibility” for Derrida, and as “intuition of the universe” and a “taste for the infinite” for Schleiermacher. Yet this interaction and “responsibility” characteristic of religious experience cannot be reduced to interaction between two discrete beings, because ‘sacred reality’ as Eliade attempts to describe it seems to transcend normative ontological categories, including those of being and non-being. In other words, the sacred is much more, or perhaps much “other” than just a “supernatural agent”.
    In the beginning of chapter three, Eliade explains that it is his intention to show “how sacrality is revealed through the very structures of the world.”13 Eliade’s account of how objects or features of the world can spontaneously become symbols in the course of being apprehended illustrates this. Using a stone as an example, he writes: “The hierophany of a stone is pre-eminently an ontophany; above all, the stone is, it always remains itself, it does not change—and it strikes man by what it possesses of irreducibility and absoluteness, and in so doing, reveals to him by analogy the irreducibility and absoluteness of being.”14 This is an example of the way in which the transcendent can be glimpsed through immanent materiality, and is in this way contingent upon the particular features of the world. But there is not necessarily a fixed definition of “transcendent” for Eliade himself—it can include whatever principle(s) something appears to embody or symbolize. The starry night sky is another example he gives. Contemplating the “celestial vault” produces a kind of religious experience because it appears infinite, outside of time.15 Because of the way that the night sky appears to us, it sets up a vast, even an ultimate, distinction between our finite selves and its apparent infinity. Even though ontologically the “sky” is just space and stars, from the perspective of earth and via the human senses it becomes an integrated thing, a “celestial vault”, and attributing meaning to it as a ‘thing’ is inevitable.

    In this view, religion becomes a store-house for the transcendent principles gleaned from hierophanies. But what is interesting in that model is that it actually makes “the Sacred” a phenomenon beyond religion—in other words it cannot completely be contained by religion as we know it, or religion as it has actually played out in history. Perhaps this could help explain why Eliade’s work has often been mischaracterized for disregarding religion’s socio-historical contingency and criticized for conceiving of the “sacred” as a sort of eternal, unchanging presence that intermittently manifests throughout history. In my view Eliade’s articulation of the concepts of “Sacred” and “Profane” are indeed useful for illuminating ideas of holiness and sanctity that have historically arisen in religion, but they ultimately serve an even more profound purpose—that is, to try and articulate how meaning and value arise and become controlling factors or currencies in human culture. Since symbolic activity pervades human life far beyond the realm of religion, but yet historically the assignment of ultimate meaning to the world has been the purview of religion, it seems that questioning the evolution of religious thought cannot be disconnected from questioning the evolution and process of meaning making (semiosis) itself.

    A compelling insight into semiotics can be taken from Eliade’s concept of hierophany. That is, the ability for things in the world—stones, trees, animals—to spontaneously become symbols, in addition to what they ‘actually’ are (and indeed, to be both things simultaneously). A stone is both a stone and a window to divine reality, perhaps because it tells us something about permanence that we cannot know just by interacting with our own bodies (for example). This is a sort of language of objects, where the “information” imparted is non-representational or non-discursive. Instead, the information is synthesized through human interaction with the actual physical and sensory qualities of the object. This ability of things to signify something far beyond themselves is mimicked or simulated in human material culture in the fashioning of objects of contemplation, both in religious and “secular” modes. Eliade gives the “secular” example of the miniature gardens popular among modern Chinese “literati”, which represent a “paradisal world." I would offer as a “religious” example Byzantine icons or relics, which are both simultaneously material objects and transcendent windows that yield insight into the structure of a particular spiritual economy (in this case the relationship of the saints to Christ and the Trinity, seen in that tradition as a facet of ultimate reality).

    This ability for objects to appear as two things at once, both as object and symbol of something “other”, is something elucidated in critical theorist Bill Brown’s landmark essay on “Thing Theory," This theory caught my eye because it was cited in Patricia Cox Miller's excellent book The Corporeal Imagination, which is about materiality and the sacred in Late Antique Christianity. Brown distinguishes “things” from mere “objects” because “things” are objects that disrupt the normal perceptual flow of space and time. In this way they are a little bit like Eliade’s definition of the function of the Sacred—they create a wrinkle in space and time, making its texture “non-homogenous”. Brown writes that an everyday object could achieve “thing” status when it “stops working” the way it is supposed to, like “when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”18 As such these things are, in a way, enchanted, because they possess a sort of suspended animation—they are, or have been, or will be, extensions of us and our agency. It is not, of course, as if we actually believe that these things have a soul or spirit, but rather that we acknowledge the way in which our own “soul” (whatever that may be) is reflected in—and to an extent, inhabits—features of the outside world.

    Though he does not explicitly connect “things” to holiness in any overarching way, there is a sort of phenomenology of enchantment articulated in his essay. He suggests that “[y]ou could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.”19 Such “magic” is evident in the items of “memorabilia” one often sees arranged in living rooms, on bookshelves or the mantle. These objects comprise a sort of personal iconography of memory for whoever arranged them there, and they are certainly things—most definitely to their owner, but even to a lesser degree to strangers who, merely by their placement infer that they are more than just objects. Even an acorn or a leaf, if placed on a mantle among other items, becomes a “thing”, it suddenly has a deep—if not transcendent—meaning. Brown’s article points to the fact that, even from the secular view of critical theory, there is still an immense power, a semiotic fecundity, in our sensorial relationship to objects that speaks to a process by which we invest the material world, and thereby our own lives, with meaning. This process of investiture may be modulated by cultural categories like ‘religion’, ‘art’, ‘science’, but it is fundamentally the same process.

Re-evaluating Phenomenology of Religion

    In a recent article on re-evaluating the utility of phenomenology of religion in light of its somewhat discredited status among social-scientific scholars, Jason Blum claims that phenomenology of religion has historically offered something unique to scholars of religion, namely "interpretation of the meaning of religion from the perspective of religious experience and consciousness.” It is interpretive, and not explanatory, and developed in opposition or counter-distinction with reductionist or naturalistic accounts of religion (but is not necessarily incompatible with them). According to its detractors, the most controversial characteristic of phenomenological accounts is the notion that there is a an essential aspect of religion (the Sacred for Eliade or the Holy for Otto) that is "radically independent of history.” Additionally, phenomenologists of religion have often posited this essence as “sui-generis,” autonomous, or irreducible, which historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of religion have found problematic because it seems to them tantamount to a metaphysical claim.
Additionally, because of the central hermeneutical focus on subjective experience, phenomenologists have been accused of “endorsing the religious subject's perspective.” These particular charges have been leveled famously at Eliade was has been called a "crypto-theologian."

Indeed, it can be difficult to distinguish phenomenology of religion from theology precisely because phenomenologists take subjective experience so seriously—it is their “text”, so to speak. However, Blum suggests that as long as phenomenologists do away with these problematic aspects, phenomenology can be a viable way to study religion, and is not ultimately anti-thetical to explanatory methods (as long as those explanatory methods are open to the perspective offered by phenomenology). Blum argues that phenomenologists of religion don’t need to posit the existence of a transcendent realm in order to posit that such a realm is apprehended subjectively. He quotes Dúpre in correcting the generalization that phenomenology of religion is preoccupied with transcendence:  "The notion of transcendence is phenomenologically relevant only insofar as it enters into the immanent experience. What the transcendent object is in itself, i.e., beyond its relation to the immanent being of consciousness, is unimportant." Thus, the phenomenologist of religion ideally brackets the question of whether religious realms exist or not, and “seeks to disclose the meaning of meanings of [religion] as they are constructed, perceived, and experienced within consciousness, or from the perspective of the religious subject.”

    Thus, for Blum, phenomenology of religion is really about asking how experiences create religious meaning, and how meaning itself functions. In this way, phenomenology touches upon the insight that an inquiry into semiotics cannot be divorced from the way our bodies move, think, and feel—but yet it has been criticized as solipsist or crypto-theological because of this commitment to the ‘authority’ of religious or spiritual subjectivity. Postmodernism has since offered up a way of valuing subjectivity with its dogmas of relativism and a suspicion of objectivity, and uses deconstruction to investigate how values and meanings are culturally derived and ‘inscribed’  by cultural discourse onto persons. But this can still, in a way, ignore the ‘gestalt’ of experience—the way that it feels (and why it even matters) for our senses to gather the world around us into a coherent whole. Phenomenology offers the notion that the world as we perceive it is irrevocably ‘gestural’, and that our cognition is narrative in nature—and acknowledges that we are ‘locked in’ to this loop of interaction. In his book on ecology and the phenomenology of perception, David Abram quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who claimed that the human body’s gestural and expressive nature “extends...to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other “objects” the miracle of expression.”25 To paraphrase Abram, the world appears to speak, by virtue of simply appearing to the human subject (ibid.). This observation that ‘the world speaks’ is redolent of Eliade’s observation that for some pre-modern societies, the world means something, by default, by virtue of its existence.

    This is certainly much more than just ‘agent detection’ as characterized in cognitive science, and for that matter much more than religion. In fact, agent detection merely grazes the tip of the iceberg in terms of how, according to phenomenologists like Merlau-Ponty, Husserl, and Abram, the world is apprehended by us. It is apprehended as a vast, continuous, non-homogenous texture, displaying varying degrees of animation that respond to our engagement. In this view, when exactly does something pop out from this animate whole to ‘become’ a supernatural agent or a discrete entity? It is certainly a valid question, but the treatment of supernatural agents in cognitive-evolutionary accounts of religion seems to draw too much of a distinction between religious cognition and non-religious cognition, when perhaps they are on a shared continuum—only separated by degree and not kind. There is more to be said about religion than just the false attribution of agency, because according to Merleau-Ponty and Abram, all meaning itself is derived from such a ‘false attribution of agency’—or rather, the impressions that the world ‘presses’ onto us. Therefore it is trite to claim this as unique of religion—it does not tell us anything interesting.

    When considering the “scientific” study of belief, it is useful to keep in mind the question: Why do we perceive in the first place? In order to eat, to escape danger, to gather parts of the material world to ourselves. To paraphrase a former professor, teaching a class on evolutionary psychology, the brain didn’t evolve to tell us the truth about what’s out there. It evolved out of vectored relationships with other processes—it evolved by perceiving patterns that might be useful or strategic to the organism, and by navigating complex landscapes. The ecology of the natural world, structured by interconnected webs of relation, is the fundamental blueprint for the ‘ecology’ of language and meaning—indeed all symbolic systems, and so too religion.

    To consider how this is so, we can examine theories that see language itself as continually evolving. David Abram describes how Merleau-Ponty both expanded and deviated from Saussure’s conception of language’s two-fold structure, one part being la langue—language as an abstract, symbolic system of relations, and the other la parole—the actual act of speaking. Merleau-Ponty sees the two as reciprocal. Abram writes “while individual speech acts are surely guided by the structured lattice of the language, that lattice is nothing other than the sedimented result of all previous acts of speech, and will itself be altered by the very expressive activity it now guides. Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience.” In other words, the process by which meaning is made and re-made has not changed much over the thousands of years in which humans have been able to speak or express, it merely has gotten more complex, more fractal in nature. As Merleau-Ponty undoubtedly saw, in the course of studying linguistics, there has been an overemphasis on its representational aspect—on the system of language as a static bank of meaning, or as even being the source of meaning itself.   But although language has a history, this history does not completely determine its use. As we will see, cognition (and our understanding of it) may reflect a similar state: though it has an evolutionary history, that history does not determine its use—and moreover, it remains to some degree an open and evolving system, which is itself an evolutionary strategy!

The take home message, may be:
The history of language does not completely determine its use
The history of the brain does not completely determine its use
The history of the sacred does not completely determine its use

And the dethroned phenomenologist Mircea Eliade might be best looked at as not a religionist,
but a semiotician, interested (like Whitehead) in how value and meaning arise in human culture. In this case, many of the criticisms leveled against him no longer apply.

It turns out the "sacred" goes way beyond religion.

(( To be Continued! ))

Relation and Meaning in Barbara King’s Evolving God

For a bit of background—the blurb on the book Evolving God from Barbara J. King's website:

Can scientists discover a prehistory of religion just as they have traced the evolution of technology, language, and art? What does compassion in chimpanzees, or burial patterns in our human ancestors and Neanderthals, tell us about the origins of religion? In Evolving God, named a Top Ten Religion Book for 2007 by the American Library Association, Barbara King explores these questions.

    In Breaking the Spell, philosopher Daniel Dennett expands upon biologist Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes to explain how belief systems could ultimately co-opt the will of their adherents the way that a parasite can change its host animal’s behavior to further the parasite’s own reproduction. Memes, in this view, are a cultural analog to genes, and as such are the basic units of cultural transmission. The ‘memes’ that survive are the ones that are more memorable and impart advantages onto their users. Whatever the reasons for why and how religious behavior evolved in humans (Dennett reviews several theories), the concept of the meme as a ‘selfish’ entity is central for him, and he appears to feel that religion has essentially outstayed its welcome—outlasted its utility in the human race. The threat of religion, for Dennett, is that it somehow undermines individual capacity for rational and logical thinking.

    Memetics, at least as employed by Dawkins and Dennett, does not seem to be a detailed enough theory of cultural transmission because it attempts to argue that cultural evolution must operate by the same rules as genetic evolution. In this model, memes—as replicating units of culture—can be either beneficial, neutral, or parasitic to their ‘hosts’. Even in the realm of cognitive science where theories of “memetics” are more articulated, units of cultural transmission are often explained in terms of “thinking”, “ideas” and “cognition”, while the roles of emotion, situatedness, and affectivity are minimized or absent. While the meme-gene analogy may offer useful ways (especially for scientists) to think about culture, it is too easy to use memetics in its Dennettian form to essentially “write off” human culture as epiphenomenal, occurring on the surface of biological evolution. It seems odd to characterize any system of human meaning (in this case religion) as epiphenomenal or vestigial when one is interested in questions of “experience." When it comes down to it, Breaking the Spell just doesn’t seem to address issues of devotionalism, phenomenology, or subjectivity in religion, if simply because the author has concluded that the ‘pros’ of these things don’t outweigh the ‘cons’ he sees in religion. The book is a standard textbook for introducing cognitive-evolutionary approaches to religion, and contains many fascinating and sensible conclusions. Even so, using “memes” as the only way to broach the subjective realm leaves much to be desired for the religionist.

    There might, however, be a way to investigate, and even emphasize human subjectivity in a “scientific” account of religion’s origins. In her book Evolving God, evolutionary anthropologist Barbara J. King attempts to excavate the affective and emotional roots of religion which she believes to be foundational to the human imperative of spirituality. For her “religion is all about practice and emotional engagement with the sacred, as defined by one’s social group; it is not necessarily about a set of beliefs concerning supernatural figures.” Thus her definition of religion differs from Dennett’s, who is more of a proponent of religion as a set of beliefs organized around supernatural entities. King criticizes the mainstream emphasis on “genes and brains” in her field, contending that it is too clinical and focused on individual psychology and pathology, and also on information as opposed to modes of transmission. Dennett’s conception of religion does indeed focus more on individual “brains” (and also assumes the homogeneity of cognitive architecture across the human race) while King believes that the human need to belong—arising from our evolution as social mammals—gave rise to what we call religion. In this view, the need to connect with each other led to the need to connect with the sacred. Though our need to connect with each other might have arisen from an evolutionary strategy for favoring group formation, it has manifested subjectively as a set of emotions and desires relating to connecting affectively with “others”, and consequently the ultimate “Other” that is God (or other, non-sentient sacred realities like the “infinite”). King goes so far to assert that sociality and “belongingness” drives cognitive evolution, and not the other way around.

    It is not my intention to confirm or deny the outcome of the book’s larger goal of demonstrating the existence of religious meaning in pre-history. However, King’s emphasis on meaning, sociality, and the process by which meaning is made provide for an interesting thought experiment for human apprehension of the sacred in primitive settings. For King, meaning itself is not as much informational as it is emotional—which also means vectored or gestural “to” and “from” something—and thus shaped by specific group dynamics and mutable instead of fixed. In fact, it might make sense to say that for King, emotion and meaning form a feedback loop, because emotion is stirred through the experience of shared meaning and the dynamics of inter-personal communication. While Dennett, in a more Cartesian vein, is guided by questions of being and substance (e.g. memes and cognitive architecture, ‘neural wiring’, etc.), King in a more Whiteheadian vein emphasizes becoming and encounters (events) as being the true primary building blocks in human religious reality. She quotes Buber several times in the first chapter as someone whose philosophy corroborates her theory: ”all life is encounter”, “in the beginning is the relation”, and “man becomes an I through a You” all echo the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and others which sees events (not individual objects) as what give rise to the characteristics of reality, including the illusion of its static or essential nature.

    Based on this, one guesses that King doesn’t locate primary forms of religious meaning in doctrines, texts, or even in language—but in experience. King writes that “humans seek God...in order to co-create meaning with sacred beings.” She rejects theories of semiotics that are based on a linear sender-receiver model in which a signal is sent from creature A and subsequently interpreted by creature B. This model places too much emphasis on “the signal” as something fixed and static that is sent—like a package—and ‘deciphered’ by the receiver, and also overemphasizes the “signal” as the central thing around which the act of communication is based. No doubt a computational understanding of information—as being digital and code-based—has influenced such models. Instead, King favors a hypothesis of meaning-making she calls “co regulation” that emphasizes the dynamic and embodied aspects of communication as it occurs in a situated time and place. In this view, the unit of “semiotic” analysis is the social event of communication, rather than disembodied signals. King writes:

“When apes or humans communicate, they adjust to each other’s actions and choices moment by moment, just as one dancer subtly shifts the placement of a hand, or the speed and angle of a turn, as her dance partner shifts his. Co-regulation, then, is the unpredictable and contingent mutual adjustment between partners.” (42, King)

Thus, meaning not contained only in signals themselves, but in the act of communication. Really, signals cannot be separated from senders and receivers at all—it is almost as if we, as living, communicating beings, are signals ourselves—we are somehow fundamentally semiotic in nature. “Co-regulation” illustrates the ways in which signals and meaning are dynamic and have to be constantly re-negotiated and agreed upon. It is in the event of communication between two beings where any gap or dissonance between a ‘signal’ and its supposed ‘meaning’ is adjudicated. This contested nature of language and meaning has been taken up in the humanities by thinkers like Derrida and Ricoeur, and has greatly influenced postmodern and poststructuralist discourse. It is notable (and heartening for religionists interested in transdisciplinarity) that King’s theory, firmly situated within evolutionary and biological anthropology, comes to similar conclusions.

    The Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher’s concept of religion resonates with King’s. In On Religion, he writes that “religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.” The most “universal formula of religion” is “intuition of the universe,” a sense of the infinite. Whether or not supernatural beings exist in an empirical sense, for King as for Schleiermacher, the phenomenon whereby sacredness is perceived is a fundamental framing mechanism for all human meaning. Sacred reality is an impression, a feeling created by (and generative of) a desire not just to agree upon meanings with other humans, but to somehow share meaning with the larger, super/supra-human world. For King, as for contemplative philosophers of religion like Schleiermacher, this reaching-for the sacred is a fundamental index for human purpose and meaning, and not delusional in the least.

Related posts on semiotics/memetics:

Reviving Eliade for a Semiotics of the Sacred
the oldest language on earth
Computers: Confounding Philosophy Since the Atomic Age 
Memetics, Religion, and the Ancient Greco-Roman World

A Tribute to Terence

“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”

-Terence McKenna

I love you man. Rest in chaos. ;)

I agree with him, mainly in that I think we've lost respect for it (chaos, that is). (Sidenote: I don't always agree with demonizing the ego, that's one reason I don't like a lot of New Age rhetoric, because it can sometimes be just as chastising as the religious systems it seeks to escape from, though I don't necessarily think that's what Terence is doing here... but that's a whole other post...)

Anyway, I do indeed think about chaos a lot, and the relationship between chaos and order, because I think in that transition zone there is something ineffable that is only captured through an attitude of simultaneous reverence and curiosity, and definitely a whole lot of humility. Some ancients called this attitude "apophasis," which means "to mention without mentioning" and is a way of (not) talking about God.

Sometimes I think that the dark stuff needs liturgy just as much as the light stuff does, or if not a liturgy then at least more literary/mythic representation. Why? Not because we 'like' destruction per se. It's not a question of like or dislike. But because it's powerful and we need to figure out how to deal with it. Period, end of story. I've always felt that Hindu philosophy had a really good grasp of this, and Taoism. It's really too bad that chaos/trickery has gotten a bad rap in some views, namely that it is sometimes associated with 'the dark arts.'

I mean I'm not saying we all have to go eat an 8th of mushrooms or be black block anarchists or anything. Terence McKenna is associated with "drugs" and Timothy Leary is associated with "drugs". But we've got to stop that association. Terence was interested in the psychedelic experience which is not "drugs" and does not require "drugs." Hallucinogens can be a shortcut to a raw, face to face experience with the destructive force, and it's uncontrolled in our society because no one knows how to deal with vision quests or asceticism. Thus with one hand our society wages the war on drugs and with the other hand it punishes the people it didn't give any options to to begin with. But in other cultures and times, there were social and cultural structures for that kind of thing. Psychedelic is a new word, as in the 20th century. What it describes has a long legacy and could be said to be at the literary core of many religions. The fact that Terence describes some of the exact SAME imagery as you find in 2000 year old Jewish and Christian apocalypses (narratives of a holy person, rabbi, or sage's ascent through heavenly realms to the throne/glory/vision of God) is really interesting to me.

His description of the "self-transforming machine elves" that he experiences while under the influence of DMT has a striking similarity to an account I just came across in a text called The Apocalypse of Abraham that dates from the 1st to the 3rd century C.E., probably from Palestine. This is one of those texts that blurs the lines between "Christian" and "Jewish", and it has as its protagonist the patriarch Abraham well known from the Hebrew Bible. In the narrative, Abraham is taken to the 7th heaven by an angel, up toward a heavenly site of "fiery flames." There, he encountered angelic beings speaking an unintelligible language. The text then describes the beings: "They were all changing in aspect and shape, running and changing form and prostrating themselves and crying aloud words in a language I did not know."

The aspect of these beings (who are similar to the "Watchers" described in the pseudepigraphical books of Enoch) as continually shape-shifting is not the only commonality between Terence and this ancient mystical text. Angelic or divine language was also a topic of interest to many ancient mystics, often present in some form in apocalyptic or mystical texts like the one cited above. There is a great deal of theological language-theory also in rabbinic literature, although there it is more common to view Hebrew as the Adamic language—the language of creation spoken by the angels. Many cultures the world over have divine language theories. Whether they are about an esoteric non-human language, or about a human language that is superior to all others, all these theories rest on the notion of a non-arbitrary language. Deconstructionist language theory is all about how language is an arbitrary system of signs -- in other words, that there is no rhyme or reason to the sign's connection to its referent. But divine language theories (and yes, they do deserve to be called theories, because ancient peeps were wicked smaaht) instead posit that there is a non-random connection between a spoken tongue and the world. This is partially why you get theories in religious systems of language creating the world or having magical/theurgic power.

Terence deals with linguistics a lot actually, he's kind of a fan of glossolalia. The self-transforming machine elves that he describes as intrinsic parts of the DMT visionary realm have a 'maintenance' function similar to the liturgical function of the Watchers or Seraphim of apocalyptic literature, who are seen as always engaging in the celestial liturgy of praising God. But Terence's elves are more like the little gremlins in the boiler room of the Universe, because unlike Angels who are often kind of serious and somber (at least the way we've culturally received them), the elves are tricksters, and they couldn't do what they do without being tricksters. Terence often describes them as being literally made of language. For Terence, the world is indeed made of language, and it would only be right if the entities that took care of the world did so by possessing a sort of sympathetic essence with the chaotic/evolving/self-immolating essence of the universe. Also note that Watchers/Seraphim are often called "the fiery ones" and holy fire is a huge part of this entire milieu of religion in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, of which we have inherited a stunted form (one that over-emphasises fire as a metaphor for damnation). What we forget is that fire is one of the central images of Christian apotheosis and also an attribute or effect of the presence of God in the Hebrew Bible. It is so potent a symbol because it is simultaneously destructive and purifying—and its effect on the terrestrial realm changes depending on context. But I can't help seeing it as just a fundemntal homily to Chaos, right there in the center of our Western traditions...

Back to the part about language... I interpret Terence's "world is made of language" proposition in a biosemiotic way myself—I.e. the world as the living and process-based entity that we apprehend is made of a system of signs and referents that far exceed the realm of human linguistics and semiotics. I am not compelled to interpret "the world is made of language" to be equivalent to the platitude of "language creates your reality" or even to mean that human language  has any special kind of power. Indeed, I'm not disagreeing with the latter two ideas, but just trying to say that what Terence is saying—I think—goes way beyond those, and definitely encompasses them/takes them for granted.

There needs to be a comparative study of theophanic imagery in Terence's work. Maybe there's some crazy English professor out there who has done this? To me, him and Philip K Dick are right up there with Ezekiel and Enoch. Prophets of the age of techno-science.

Yet, I wouldn't call Terence a religious man. Would you? It's an open question.

But in the meantime I quite fancy thinking of Terence as the Bizarro Jesus. I mean you have to admit, they have a lot in common.

***

A final loving word on chaos. Every great mentor I've had in my life, whether it was a peer, someone I worked for, someone who taught me, for a day or for longer, farmers, hunters, and naturalists, my mother -- at the core of all their great teachings is that if you befriend the dynamic, chaotic, ever-evolving forces around you, if you gain an intuitive aptitude about how things work, there won't ever be a clear distinction between bad and good forces, there will only be adaptation—survival. But that doesn't mean coldness, that there is no emotion, no suffering or joy—no, it is more profound when all things flow and adapt. In fact to be able to adapt you need to know how to love, and you need to love fiercely. Mostly you need to love life, (and as Neal Stephenson says in the beginning of Cryptonomicon), you need to salute every living thing as a badass just for having evolved, just for having been born, just for existing. "Love everyone" is misinterpreted too much and it doesn't mean you should like everyone or be obsequiously friendly to everyone or not be on guard or not trust your intuition or not eat animals or not defend yourself. It just means that you recognize that the universe is f*cking badass and it is "non-simultaneously apprehended" (as Bucky says), so basically that translates to "you have to be humble because you don't have all the strategic information." I've heard a definition of God as "the being that possesses all the strategic information." But see, the modus operandi of humility and love aren't only justified if you beleive in God, because the natural state of the universe is to kick the asses of all living things (lovingly or violently depending on how you want to interpret it), and if we ever aren't reverent it's because we are in a temporary state of technologically/industrially-induced amnesia with respect to that. Thus, for me, teachings about "darkness" and about "light" both come back to Love. So I really don't see what's so bad about embracing the Dark Mother. All my heroes did. Big shout out to Hermann Hesse on that!!

The Word Made Cybernetic: The Cyborg as Ascetic

In the first pages of his book The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, Geoffrey G. Harpham opens with a discussion about St. Athanasius of Alexandria's Life of Antony, one of the most influential texts in Western literature and more directly formative in the genre of Late Antique hagiography (saint's lives). Seen as the hagiography par exellence, this text gave shape to the holy man as cultural superhero in the Late Antique world, at a moment when the formerly sectarian Christian religion was spreading to the point where it was being endorsed an even defended by the Late Roman and Byzantine State. The text is also fundamental because of its authority in a specific discourse of asceticism, which is derived from a Greek word meaning "training" or "discipline", but is associated with its more visible 'effects' as encountered by a non-ascetic: the unkempt hair, long beard, single garment, emaciated figure, spartan abode, and tranquil presence of the ascetic master.

St. Antony was a founding figure of the Christian tradition of desert monasticism that took off in the 4th century C.E.—withdrawal from urban or populated areas to solitary wilderness abodes where a practitioner would effectively practice defeating any desire for 'the world'—often, as with Antony, this took the form of battling with demons. Ascetic practice often consisted of daily prayer, meditation, dietary austerity, fasting, and strict restrictions on sleep. It bears many similarities to Indian yogic tradition as well as the renunciation undertaken by the Buddha, but ostensibly the Christian ascetic was engaging in a form of imitation of Christ, and also imitation of the Christian martyrs who made up the first saints and 'holy people' in the tradition.

Within the tradition, Asceticism is not seen as hate for the body or "deprivation", even though those are popular 'outsider' associations. Instead, it is seen as a perfection of the body for its highest possible purpose, which especially in the Eastern Christian tradition was a form of theosis in the contemplation of God. As one Abba said, it is not the body that he wants to 'kill', but desires.

Also germane for our discussion, asceticism is associated with special abilities or "gifts." In The Lives of the Desert Fathers and other hagiographical literature from Late Antiquity, desert fathers (and mothers) often possess powers of clairvoyance (they know for example, the very moment an Abba dies in a faraway region), prophecy (seeing the future), teleportation (Abbas often crossed rivers this way), shamanistic abilities to communicate with animals, exorcism, and of course, healing the sick (even by distance). They also typically possess superhuman levels of endurance—especially with regard to nourishment. Some are said to have gone without eating for unbelievable amounts of time or subsist on very little food (a few lentils per day). In the 'ascetic zeitgeist' of the desert movement, it was often hard to separate these charismatic, extra-institutional figures from cult heroes that would distract people from devotion to Christ (or, politically worse—the Church, which was fragmented with factionalism at this time and fighting for imperial alliance). Thus, it was important for the ones fighting for authority through textual discourse to emphasize that these holy people did not acquire their power themselves, rather it was conferred by God. Thus emerges this image of the (Christian) ascetic as someone who is granted special abilities and charismatic gifts because they "meet God halfway." They do all the work, but when that work finally pays off in the form of ability and mastery, it is God who ratifies, and is ultimately the source, of their holy gifts. This says something interesting about human agency and the ability for humans to "signify" anything (to each other). I.e. Who is the source of meaning—us or what created us? (And you don't even need to be a theist to ponder this point, as the question is being hashed out in non-theistic fields of inquiry like process philosophy and biosemiotics). Harpham, engaging in what could be called an interdisciplinary 'literary analysis' of asceticism, writes:

[H]uman beings are incapable of true signification; the successful "performance" of signs can only be God's work. The best we can hope for ourselves is not that we learn to use signs, but that we become signs—and not spoken signs, but durable signs, "written in heaven" in a script which, defying the nature of script itself is intimate with the divine essence.

Thus, God is the "true author" of the sign that is the ascetic body—the sinewy figure and glowing countenance of the yogic master is not (just) a product of his own individual agency, rather it is a signification, a sentence, a word, written—made decipherable—by the Creator (or Cultural Discourse if you like) as part of a higher-order "conversation" (in which living creatures, ever expanding in semiotic complexity, are like set-pieces on an infinite game-board). The will of this holy man may have played a great part—indeed, it did most of the heavy lifting—in engendering what is seen when we behold him. But none of this—none of his training, his discipline—is legible to others unless it is somehow inscribed on his body—or as his body. The integration of a "bottom-up" process with another "top-down" process provides the outcome, which is: The living body as a whole cannot be a sign unless recognized, and ratified, by an Other, or others. This is why in many ways we are signs not authored by ourselves (even though we are)... because we appear to others as coherent systems, whereas we experience ourselves as fragmented, incoherent, and open. Thus, along with thinking of asceticism as inscription upon the body, it is also useful to think of the body as itself an instrument of inscription. But who is the Scribe? Whoever or whatever it is (God, Evolution, Nature, Memes, Stardust, take your pick) it has always seemed clear that we cannot be it.

Or can we? Enter the cyborg. The cyborg is a "cybernetic organism" that has been, in modern literary imagination, divided roughly into two categories: The android, who is manufactured and not of human origin, that incorporates living tissue (to varying degrees), or the bionic (modified) human. Androids can, and do, vary in their ratios of organic/mechanical, but as technology within science fiction and cinematographic special effects become more advanced, androids have been envisioned as less like machines reducible to parts (i.e. the Terminator or Data) and as functional simulacra of humans, even biologically indistinct (like the later model Cylons). Cyborgs of human origin come from the imagination of a future in which human technology will enable a cybernetic merging of human-with-computer (in both mental and physiological capacities) to produce life extension and/or "superhuman" abilities (one example of this kind of cyborg is Major Motoko Kusanagi from the Ghost in the Shell franchise). Just as hagiographical literature constructs the holy ascetic is a "sign" authored by God, Cyborgs are "signs" authored by us—in code—in a machine language. But to what end? As part of what conversation? In essence, I think it's a conversation we've been having for a long time.

St. Antony, who was mentioned above, is one among many Christian saints who, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, have been the objects of local cult veneration for nearly as long as Christianity itself. I won't get into the theological technicalities of how the Vatican and the Patriarchates formally justify saint worship and separate it from idolatry—because that would entail nothing less than a book on the history of Christianity. But the point is that saints have historically been venerated as "intercessory" figures that can grant miracles (especially healing) and treated as spiritual 'celebrities' or personal guardians/patrons (even to the exclusion of God/Christ or the Virgin Mary), yet they are also historical people who were members of actual Christian communities and lived and died like 'the rest of us'. Yet they are also enhanced, super-human, "perfect", but yet not in an unreachable way (since they are not God). The lines of distinction between Christ and the Saints grows thin, since especially according to the metaphysics of relics they are envisioned as physically merging with Christ after death (and so their physical remains are, much like icons, 'overshadowed' and in some sense alive with the presence of the Holy Spirit). Tracking the history of Christian saints is a fascinating way to do anthropology because it reveals the way in which diverse local conditions across Europe and the Near East met with extant ideals that defined what a holy person was—the tension created by these dual realities has proven to be immensely prolific. They are like the ancient hero cults of the Greco-Roman world, but somehow a more open category, less located in a mythic past. They are also like the Bodhisattvas of Mayana Buddhism if only in their intercessory role in the spiritual economy.

Many people in American culture, influenced by Protestant, anti-clerical views, see saint veneration (and the veneration of the Virgin Mary) as silly or superstitious. To them it represents the remnants of a broken system. This is unfortunate, because what many fail to see beyond their "patriotism" and political biases toward the Catholic church is the immense and patently obvious devotional value of saints. As one of my professors succinctly put it, representations of saints reflect anxieties and desires related to what it means to be human—their representation in literature, iconography, or oral tradition, are means to track these concerns. What are the limits of human freedom? What are we capable of? How do we remain after we die? (Not to mention all the ethical shenanigans)... moreover, there is often, in my view, something mutant, deviant, abject, about the holy men and women that win sainthood. In many ways the entire discourse of human sanctity anticipates contemporary transhumanist thought. In fact, it makes better sense to say that transhumanist thought and cyberpunk literature is merely the latest iteration of existential anxiety surrounding questions of the nature of the consciousness, death, mind/body dualism, and essential continuity of anything that could be identified as the self.

There is a sort of secular devotionalism inherent in our attitudes toward cyborgs, because they share one particular discursive role with the figure of the saint—that is, they try to "answer" similar existential/spiritual/ethical concerns. We are not "done" with the question of being... far from it...we have only just begun! Comparing the cyborg to the ascetic is delightfully ironic, since the two seem philosophically opposite—the former associated with godlessness and hubris, and the latter associated with exemplary piety and servitude (and its reward)? But yet "opposites attract", and I have a feeling that the cyborg is, in the symbolic order, a sort of inverted saint, yet functionally they serve a similar "devotional" purpose, and this is what I'm interested in. Perhaps it is only what we are worshiping has changed—then it was God's power, and his mystery, now it is the power of science, which is the power of nature as ours to appropriate—and so just as it is a sort of worship, it is also recognition of something ominous, awesome, and fearful—because we have now divided God into a million parts and are "free" to do with them what we wish—but there is a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that we are still not "free"—there is still a fate for us. Thus the cyborg is a sort of eschatological figure, especially in its vengeful "evil" guise which is more apocalyptic.

In the universe of science fiction, the cyborg/android is the "perfected body"—the modern spin on the ancient ascetic. But the cyborg is perfected by a radically different technology than the dialogic and rhetorical "technologies" that produced ascetic bodies in the Late Antique Mediterranean. They are "perfect" in an a-priori way—born or made that way—they didn't have to "work" for it. And this privilege (cyborg priviledge?) is connected, in our literary imagination, with an insidious darkness. The "perfected body" is the goal of ascetic praxis, but enfolded within the perfection of the body is the perfection of the mind. However, the cyborg is "made" perfect (though a different definition of perfect than in ascetic discourse), but the "mind" is deranged—characterized by void, lack, privation. But this is yet another epistemic trap that we've set for ourselves, because there is no "mind" apart from the body. Thus the persistence of Cartesian mind-body dualism in modern culture embarrassingly shows through the earlier cyberpunk conceptions of "the evil cyborg". Students of gender studies will have a field day with the depiction of cyborgs in film, since one interpretation of their 'perfection' is iterated through notions of ideal masculinity or femininity—not to mention sexual prowess and allure. But yet this is merely one more "empty sign"—a trick, since their sexuality is vestigial, "for show"... this epitomizes their ability to "be signs" and also "not be signs". They are skeumorphs of humans. Somehow this is an intense object of desire/fear...

The "evil cyborg" epitomizes the poststructuralist apprehension of the "runaway text" lost in a maze of discourse, completely escaped from its original "authorial intent." The sentient machine, though, is text (literally code) that has become sentient—self aware—but since its sense of self is alien to our own, what it has really become is "other-aware": aware of us. And this is the moment when the cyborg-android is its most threatening—perfect, superhuman, aware of us, yet not necessarily "aware of itself" in any human way at all. But it is interesting that we would incarnate a sort of concsiousness that "sees us"... because that is what God was (is) supposed to do. But the cyborg is decidedly NOT God. And therein lies its chilling power, its 'creepiness'... it has most of the attributes of God, except for care. Love. Probably "God's" most defining factor. And when you leave out that ingredient, what do you have? The Devil? Cyborgs are certainly demonized, especially in their cyberpunk forms. But that argument is too simplistic—they can't be the "devil" by the same exact token by which they aren't God. They are somewhere between human and God. Which is to say, because we're talking in hermeneutical language here, they are somewhere between what we "mean" when we talk about being God and what we "mean" when we talk about being human. The saint, too, is such an intermediary figure, suspended between theosis and "mere" humanity.

They are the subject of our envy not only because of their physical ability, but because they often don't have human desires or fears. They have a different relationship to "death"—if they have one at all. One common trope for android-cyborgs in science fiction is that they learn to become more human, either by their own volition or because of encouragement from their human peers. In other words, they are 'forced' to desire it. The result is the becoming-human of the Other (as God became human in Christ?) and the climax is the (our) emotional relation to this Other, achieving the seemingly impossible and paradoxical. This sort of emotional catharsis is so well epitomized in the relationship between John Connor and the Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Here, the human boy and the cyborg programmed to protect him forge a friendship, but it ends in emotional tragedy (for John) because ultimately the cyborg has to self-destruct to fulfill his mission.

 In this way we sublimate our desire for relationship with the unknowable into the figure of the cyborg. We want to be them and they want to be us. How quaint! They are envisioned as malicious by default—abject-ified—but also envisioned as heroes, saviors, oracles—thus like saints and "holy men" their power, their signification, ultimately comes from a strange but efficacious mix of deviance (or hybridity or mutation) with sanctity—and what is sanctity if not at least the enshrinement of what is "ideal"? Since the "miracles" our cyborg-heroes perform are a product of techno-science, reducible to code that we wrote, they somehow outperform their ascetic predecessors because they are programmable—there is no mystery or question of whether they will succeed in their heroic endeavors. They do actually embody a certain kind mystery but it is elsewhere—instead of the sublime mystery of faith they embody a sort of "dark mystery", the darkness felt by the fragmented and incoherent self.


We need our fix... Even in an age—in a genre—that has forgotten about God, and with him, the Devil... we still have to get our darkness (ourselves) somewhere. 

Is Virtuality Inherently Social?

Exploring the consideration that virtuality is fundamentally social—both its greatest asset & greatest weakness

Social media in its current —and defining—form is perhaps only a little over a decade old. But the core essence—which is, the function—of things like Facebook, Reddit, and Tumblr, that is, sociality (and the reification or formation of group identities), is the seed of the entire internet (and I contend, possibly all of virtuality, which predates even telecommunication in print forms). It's easy to see the world wide web as a disembodied sea of data—an entity in its own right—with which we each individually interact through the lens of our computer screens in order to procure information, as if we're miners extracting ore from the earth, or devotees all propitiating a faraway god in respective isolation. This image reveals a dilemma—the computational ideology that we are mired in that sees meaning and semiosis as linear processes that consist of the transmission of static packets of 'information' between entities. Not only is our interaction with information at large seen in this way, but our very cognition, too—our perception of reality. Ironically, this thinking of the mind-as-Turing-Machine was born out of the age of computing. Computing was born out of a need that was indeed, one could say, purely informational—the need to calculate, to count. But though modern computing may have given birth to the now-adolescent field of cognitive science that seems all too preoccupied with the individual (as opposed to the collective) and the mind (as opposed to the body), it gave birth to something else—cyberspace. Connecting machines gave rise to something that could not be farther from the cold, mechanistic nature of the algorithm—a new, terrifyingly open platform for human affect. Nothing could be, comparatively speaking, more messy, more fuzzy, more dynamic, than the interpersonal—the social relation, and also more ironic than its marriage with the smooth, hard, angular, clockwork precision of the computer—like hot blood running through cool metal veins. For a moment (some time in the 60's or 70's?), the most rudimentary personal computers were tightly coupled extensions of a single mind and personality—that is, they were closed systems. But then, through the phone line, those systems started to crack open, and this virtual self started to bleed out. After that, things were never the same. In the end, our affair with electronics as personal items that only lead back to ourselves will have been a blip on the screen of modern history. Now, all electronic devices are synechdoches of virtuality, with its eternal promise of sociality, and with that, an eerily open, omnipresent void.
   
This is to say, the existence of the personal computer, and the 'democratization' of computing that it has enabled, plays deceptively well with modern neo-liberal notions of individuality—ideal personhood means professional, autonomous, knowledgeable, original. And this is all catalyzed and annealed through a bionic coupling with a world of information modulated via the computer—an ethereal, oddly "other" world whose human history it is too easy to forget. But don't let it fool you! This "individuality" is provisional—a stepping stone on the path to collectivity of a higher order. Our concept of information itself—and thus our definition of "Information Technology"—is fundamentally flawed, too. There is a need for a paradigm shift, and part of that involves shifting backwards through time, to the moment where the first sign appeared. What was it, a chemical excreted by an amoeba, an animal's scratch on a log, a footprint, a circadian rhythm? But that's just it—signs don't just appear, they are apprehended. They become signs—that is, they come to 'contain' information—through relation. When you talk of information, you must try to train yourself to stop using the verb "to be", because information never "is", it only "becomes". There is no fundamental substance of which information is made—nope, not even now, when it's stored as code, on vast server farms, because it's still, when you get down to it, just light (and mostly trash). No technology can escape the fact that all matter is energy. That technology—the technology of vibration—is woven into the very fabric of the universe.

 My dictionary defines "virtual" (in its computational sense) as "not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so". Thus, the virtual reiterates the metaphysics of process philosophy—which contends that the world is made up of events/apprehensions/relations, not particles or substances. But… it had us tricked for a moment, there. The passage to digital technology has somehow placed glaringly in the spotlight something fundamental to ALL information, that is to say, its dual nature. The simultaneous existence and non-existence of information now appears more 'concrete' because we wrote the f*cking code for it, thus essentially making it apprehensible to a 10 year old watching The Matrix. This wave/particle duality shared by both information and, according to quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, has begun to engender new ways of thinking about reality—as in, everything is information, and so every artifact is a text—which up-cycles the older esoteric adage that the world is made of language (which itself informs many magickal/occult systems of thought). But we are dealing here with information in the new, dynamical understanding, not the old, computational understanding of reality-as-computer and God-as-programmer. (That's so 1980's!) Rather, Neo's realization, whispered under his breath in The Matrix Reloaded at his second meeting with the Oracle "programs hacking programs" more more closely approximates 'what is actually going on here' (though it's still a metaphor). You may just associate this "literary" thinking with the obscure upper-floors of the ivory tower (humanities wing), but NO, you'd be wrong, because Derridean deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory, in my view, are commensurable with post-cyberpunk (even nano or biopunk) conceptions of the self and reality, and with it the ultimate plasticity and immanent semiotic potential of all of nature and the universe—which manifests in cutting-edge corners of Neuroscience, Biology and Ecology and Evolutionary Sciences if you care to look. HOW COULD EVOLUTION HAPPEN IF THE WORLD WASN'T MADE UP OF CONTINGENT MEANING AT THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL? Yet I'm an atheist. It's just that "meaning" isn't what we thought it was...

 To get back on point, I think that virtuality is ontologically—and inescapably—social, and that is why it's such a fraught and contested medium, especially today with the incursion of social media into the lives of anyone who spends time with computers. It is obvious that cyberspace is a social space, or at least, a place for encounters with other entities—but I get the feeling that this relationality somehow pervades (or has pervaded?) into all virtual and hyper-textual worlds. Thus, virtuality is social, but it's not recognized or treated as such all the time. Since humans classically fail to see what matters to them most, its utility is still little understood—but it has a history, one in which actions speak louder than words (or in this case, text). The internet came out of the needs of a particular (and exclusive) discourse community to share information (the military's DARPANET, in fact). The social/tribal/and playful uses of virtuality go back to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems, Usenet, and MUDs. You can take 'social media' even further into the analog than even BBS, into the realm of phone phreaking, where members of that community from far and wide would meet on party lines (essentially giant conference calls) to form friendships and build community (trading tips on how to build a black box was, you might be surprised, more of an added bonus). You could take it yet further into print culture, in personals ads or "letters to the editor", or you know, actual bulletin boards! As computing took over social media, it accelerated the rate of time-shifting (though this is still a defining feature of social media)—but the gap between virtual events and our apprehension of them is indeed getting thinner.

One of the things I really wanted to talk about in this essay is attention, intention, and focus, and the way that modern virtuality has in many ways fragmented, derailed, or changed-the-quality-of these human capacities. I'm not here to demonize communication technology, because I don't think that it is inescapably 'bad' for human mental, social, or physical health. But I think that many of its problems arise because we still haven't really collectively, as a society, apprehended why we have it. And to me, it has become clear that the virtual world we are continuing to create, and have been creating for quite some time now, is not as much about learning as it is about connecting. That might sound obvious, but I think it's more profound than we give it credit for—for one thing, are the two things even compatible all the time? Why should they be? I think PLAY is much more AT PLAY here than we realize, or want to realize (Apes Love Graphical User Interfaces) The virtual world may have didactic functions, but only because it is discursive. It may contain information, but only because that information was put there by a person with some intention—though by the time you see it, the original intention may be unknowable. In that way, a lot of the information that "floats" in the datasphere, some in more unmoored fashion than others, is like a footprint, an animal track that is never erased—from an animal long dead, or completely elsewhere, and in that way, is basically gibberish masquerading as information, which exhibits the unfortunate formality of being decipherable. But I digress… though there is a point of connection: Today's virtuality turns all information social (which as we discussed, it always originally was)… and our subconscious mind has figured this out long before we become cognizant of it. The effect of this subconscious awareness is that utilizing virtual space—ANY virtual space, even if it's not ostensibly social-virtual-space—maintains an odd, unavoidably open quality to it. One finds one's focus losing clarity, getting fuzzy, oscillating, in a way that simply wouldn't happen if you were sitting in the woods with a pen and paper as your only 'information technology'. (Yet, I don't mean to say that cognition does not naturally oscillate or behave like a wave-form, because I think that is its fundamental character—after all, it is the interplay of pattern and deviation from pattern that produces novelty—but virtual space, hyperspace, and cyberspace can change the frequency of the neural wave, which is most problematic when we do not understand what is happening) You see, virtuality operates in a fundamentally mantic way—it gives back what you put in (and this happens in multiple dimensions, but you can take Google algorithms that tailor search results to individual IP addresses as an extreme [blackmagic IMO] example of this sort of cybermancy) And I'm sure what I'm about to say has crossed your mind, but the tendency of virtual space to either lead you to the treasure of "finding yourself" or the trash of "losing yourself" (it doesn't usually deviate from the two extremes) underscores the fundamental ambiguity of its value, and of the ethics connected to its use. Consider this—some of the most focused I've ever been, when acting in virtual space, is when I'm INTER-acting (because this reifies the actual purpose of virtuality in the first place). Even writing a blog post is easier if I'm doing it inside the web browser and not simply in a text file on my desktop, because its inter-activity is more phenomenologically present in my perception—the potential social ramifications of it feed into my creative process, and are a part of it, instead of obstructing it and derailing it. When sociality and creativity can potentiate each other in the strange, atemporal continuum of virtuality, they produce a gleaming and sharp synergy, startling in its ability to cut through the fog that cognition often contends with in the landscape of cyberspace. My attention and will in cyberspace is most focused—sharpest—when I'm writing an email to a loved one, finally typing up a blog post that's been percolating in my mind for weeks, or _yes_ posting a comment on a Facebook thread (ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE'S A DEBATE THAT'S RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS). What this means, to me, is that agency and attention—and by extension, creation of meanings— in the virtual realm is most effective, most productive, when it is vectored in dialectic. Whether we like it or not, every action has a direction, but in cyberspace it can become easy to forget where you're pointing, because of the illusion that we leave our bodies behind and mind-meld with data. In that instance, the location of individual agency is destabilized, distributed—even more radically than it normally (already) is in meatspace, and maybe it's a good thing, if it can just teach us how powerful, how magical, how sacred, our agency is in the first place.

It's its own kind of wilderness out there in cyberspace, where the sun never sets… a wilderness of collapsed dichotomies of public and private, self and other. It's a space where expressive modalities like writing and speaking, or perceptive ones like reading and hearing, aren't so distinct. It's a city built by aliens. It's a place where shadows become real. It's an illusion that we all keep buying into because everyone else is, just like every other semiotic system that ever was. POINT IS: THAT SHIT NEEDS TO COME WITH A WARNING.

The Making of An American Anti-Prophet (for Profit), and a Healthy Dose of Old World Shadow Magic.

 DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING ESSAY IS CREATIVE NON FICTION. THAT MEANS THAT ESPECIALLY WHEN I AM WRITING ABOUT THE VIEWS OF OTHERS, OR MY INTERPRETATION OF THEM, IT CANNOT BE TAKEN AS AN ENDORSEMENT OF THOSE VIEWS.

I have a confession to make. I have a love/hate relationship with Ayn Rand. I love her for her ironically buddha-like, hedonistic, cavalier, impishly smug, joke's-on-you-America-trickery, but something about her zeitgeist disturbs—no, saddens—me, and most of all I grieve over the nomenclature of her philosophy, "objectivism", which might have had a completely different (opposite?) effect on culture if it had been called "subjectivism". I find this singular act of Naming to be one of the most profound hexes of our time, a sigil forever emblazoned in the historical consciousness of the late 20th century. The difference between a curse and a spell—between white and black magic—is on one hand in the eye of the caster. But not only. Perhaps she wouldn't agree, individualist as she was, but "black magic" doesn't  proceed only from the magician—his environment shapes his agency, constrains his options, dictates the terms of his survival. He is a slave to it, so what fault of his to summon all the casting power he can muster to transform that which enslaves him? Yes, what I'm saying is, just as Julian of Norwich did in possibly the most compassionate answer to theodicy of all time, "evil is no thing", and what you call "sin" comes from love, too, from eagerness (perhaps overeagerness?) to serve your master, the Beloved, God, the Universe, or… yes, "Mammon". But to someone, once upon a time now past, the dollar could signify salvation, because it could buy you as its newest prophet, and you could be paid to be the Messiah of the Market. Ayn Rand gets demonized by left wing America, but she was a product of her time, and of particular socio-economic circumstances characterized by "pressure differentials" in corruption across the globe—and let's not get into details about what "wing"—left or right—was broken in which place, because let's face it, corruption is corruption is corruption, and poverty is poverty, and abjection is abjection, and it ultimately doesn't matter WHY it happens. What matters it the suffering it causes, because that is where the desire to make meaning comes from (or to make sure that something masquerading as meaning never tricks you again, in the case of Derrida). I come from an unbroken line of Greek socialists and communists on my mother's side, and I also am one generation removed after the translation of that consciousness to American soil. We come from the Balkan Borderlands, the place between Rand's empire and the empire of the West. And for lack of a better way of saying it, there is a lot in our blood that is in a strange sort of communion with Rand, though we might be, according to language, political opposites (but is there such a thing, comparatively? or do rivals only exist in relation to each other?) So yes, we have more in common than not, actually. It's that immigrant ethic, that indefatigable will to survive, to leave unspeakable pain behind, to be born again without God, because how could God have let your family die, your country be torn apart? I see this in my mother, so it's second hand. And there's something tragic about that second-handedness too… it's in the silence. It's a silence that's more full of meaning than language could ever be. My mom's mother was shot and killed while out past village curfew during the Greek civil war, one of the first postwar communist insurgencies in which the United States was pivotal in supporting the right wing junta to oppose, and crush, the threat of communist revolution. My mother, one of eleven, was a toddler at the time. My grandfather had been put in jail for being a communist ("sympathizer") and my grandmother walked on foot, more than a day's walk from her village to bring him clean clothes for his trial. As she made her way back to their village, it began to get dark and she needed a place to stay. Carrying her infant daughter with her, she did not want to risk being out past the curfew in the rugged Peloponnesian terrain, where guerrilla warfare was being erratically waged. Unfortunately, her request for shelter were turned down out of the fear instilled by the communist persecutions (which means, of course, that the people who turned her away knew her). Less than a mile from their home, my mother's mother was mistaken for a rebel combatant and killed in cold blood. Adding to the terrible confusion of this "mistake", my mother's infant sister did not survive the attack, either. My mom is not the most poetic writer of English prose, but I'll never forget the moment I read that line of text, where she wrote that the day after her mother died the family dog ran to the place where she'd fallen, smelling the blood in the earth. The most theological thing my mom has ever said to me was that we all have to bear our own cross, since Christ did, when I told her that I was queer. My mom's not religious, but she's Greek, and Christianity and folk religion permeate that culture. And the responsibility to carry your own weight through life, in a pastoral village on its own high in the mountains, is not just some ancient story or some abstract explanation for human salvation. It's day by day the only way to anything close to salvation—survival.

My mother doesn't talk about growing up in Greece casually, but yet when she does it's chillingly casual. The fullest version of this story I didn't hear from her lips, I read it. On an anniversary of the Iraq war my mother was asked to give a reflection about war at our church, and she wrote 2 or 3 pages, single spaced, and read it at the pulpit. Unfortunately I couldn't be there because, as luck would have it my car broke down that day and I was stuck in the northern half of the state. But I read it later. It was called "Vassie's Story", and it was, plain and simple, the story of the destruction of her family, through that one fateful death. It was the story of why she hates war. It was the story of why, the one time I've seen her cry is when she read that news article about some Palestinians who were killed in Gaza, Palestinians that my mom would say "only had rocks in their hands". The article that was like a hundred other articles, but it's sameness just put into high relief the degree to which this sort of tragedy was mundane. The degree to which, every day, a child lost their mother in crossfire, for someone else's war.

In an article "deconstructing deconstruction" as it were, the post-structuralist historian Gabrielle Spiegel offers a haunting explanation for the post-war Jewish consciousness that gave birth to Derrida and deconstructionist thought, which in the vast ocean of oblivion created by millions of unjust deaths, doubts the ability of language to convey anything about reality, or at least anything that can come close to signifying meaning in face of the chaos of genocide. I don't have this same cellular memory of death, but maybe what I described above is something like it. How am I to know?

Something in me wants to leap to defend Ayn Rand against her detractors—of which I am one, postmodern contradiction that I am—something in there about how powerful women get villified in our culture, as deceptive, too masculine, too independent, too promiscuous, too loyal to a cause. She was a strong woman, yes, but she was a freak in her own mind because she didn't believe in strong women—in fact she didn't really think women should be in positions of leadership, at all. Doesn't that suck? I hate that I can forgive her for laughing in the face of feminism, but I know exactly why she did it. It makes sense that America had to trademark her, because she in so many ways represented The Other. Moreover, I also want to defend her from her business-suit wearing fans, the white male interviewers who can barely disguise their voyeuristic amazement while asking her if she REALLY actually believed that it was okay to be selfish, because she says what they couldn't say. She was foreign, female, and was fucking winning the game, HER game, and they used her to ventriloquize their own fantasies, to resolve their own ethical dilemmas, to do *their* dirty business. Of course, she was a willing victim on the newly-minted altar of post-industrial capitalism—she squeezed a huge degree of agency out of her world against insurmountable odds. She did the American dream better than they did, and they made her into a prophet. Since she was, as I contend, a godless mystic (according to a mix of her language and mine), she emanated pure charisma with virtually no ideological mold for it to flow into. That's pure political power at it's source, and it was like crack for the banksters. But it didn't exactly translate. Her magic couldn't be taught—somehow, it didn't survive translation. It didn't translate because Ayn Rand and her American followers couldn't have been a more tragic combination of different and the same. Sometimes religions die after one generation, sometimes they only have room for one. Call them geniuses, call them schizophrenic or sociopathic, but just don't try to imitate them. In their own way, they were imitating the Godhead in the only way they knew how, even if they call it atheism. In a weird way, Rand was sacrified on the crucible of a new era, and she continues to be a sign for the cognitive dissonance of American culture writ large. But she didn't bring salvation, except maybe to herself, she brought something far more complex —and interesting— than "salvation". A mirror, perhaps, something in disguise. She was like a sage who saw our hearts more clearly than we, and challenged us with our own image. But there's really no moral to the story because it was almost by accident, and her purpose was not to transform, it was to tell. Tell and then on to the next thing.

Ayn Rand, the person and the legend, is an enigma to me. This enigmatic tension, it's like a spiritual agitation, it's a nostalgia for something that could have been, it's the simultaneous tragedy and wonder of globalization, of the waves of revolution shaking the world like orgasms, like death throes, it's the incredible courage and ignorance of people, it's that I wish we could all be so naive, and so wise, at the same time. I wish we never mistook love for hate, compassion for selfishness, the need for belonging with the reflex of discrimination. We DO fail too see language as an arbitrary code of signs, which it sometimes is—not all the time, but sometimes. When I watch interviews with her I get the most profound sense that she was enlightened, in a way, it's something about her expression, it's that sphinxlike smirk of the Mona Lisa that almost mischievously holds back knowledge of ancient mysteries, or even the enigmatic smile you sometimes see in Marian iconography that contains both the spiritual ecstasy of salvation and the deep visceral grief of Christ's death. She is also Pan; the feral god of the forest, symbolically transmutated into the devil (the anti-god) after Christianity swept the land because he is unapologetically lustful, he is at once both passionate and indifferent. He is void of anything we recognize as identity because he came from the dark woods where there were no mirrors, no other Pans-he's a hardcore Other. So, being no-one, in a way he is everyone, the desire in all of us, the shadow counterpart to the holy spirit, Lord and Master of Chaos—once you look in his eyes he'll always know where you are and the only way to avoid possession by him is to become him. Identity is a joke to him because he learned being from mushrooms, trees, and dark red crystals in the ground—dark green things that are constantly dying and being reborn. And so her gaze is satyric, amused, but piercing, unwavering, both immanence and transcendence are in it, both presence and incredible distance, and all these "opposites" exist together, like old people in rocking chairs on a porch, you get the sense she is a master of Orwellian Doublethink, which could be championed for either destruction or liberation. And who's liberation was she seeking, in the end? That's what I don't understand. Was it really ours, the rest of us, or are we hopeless if we're even wondering? I remember in one interview, when answering a question about whether she believed in heaven or an afterlife (and thus the moral directives that it might necessitate), she stated with a conviction pious because of its nonchalance, that life on earth was the most beautiful thing that it was possible for her to comprehend, and that she loved creation, and that it was ultimately all good. At that moment she struck me as inexplicably buddhalike…. the buddha of rational self interest, ironically. Would that be the anti-buddha? And if the anti-buddha, would that not be the same as the buddha? She didn't believe in God or Religion, but she believed in something eternal.

There is something deeply mystical about feeling like it's possible to create heaven on earth, that life is all there is so we might as well eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Wasn't Paul himself on a knife's edge between proclaiming that gospel and the other one? What made him choose the other one? All the same, for her atheism I don't think one could call Rand a humanist either. A hedonist, maybe. But what is the difference, really, between selfishness and compassion? She would say they are the same. I want to know: Are they? I think when you realize that this life is all you have, and you view it with both intense love and awe yet detachment, eternity and temporality become the same thing, as do many "opposites." For the fact that she is some sort of saint of neo-liberalism, she struck me as anything but attached to this life. She was just an old soul with stories to tell. In a way it just seemed that her philosophy was just her story. It was her life story. She didn't attach too much significance to it... to meaning. In a way it was superfluous, besides the point. It was the signature of another event, like ripples in a pond.

There's something about that disposition of non-attachment, that lightness of being, that seems Eastern, esoteric, atheist and theist at the same time--Hindu, perhaps. Life is a game, divine play. So games are holy because they are games within games. Playing games can help you exact vengeance-and-gratittude for being born into this world of delicious suffering, playing games matches the above to the below, balances the equation. Meaning and meaninglessness are two sides of the same coin. My mom ran away, too, like Rand. That's another story, but the point is she ended up on this side of the Atlantic ocean. To women like this, who are weathered, who ran away, meaning is just a byproduct of survival, so best to not take it too seriously…at worst, too much meaning will just keep you paralyzed, keep you from acting. It's like they are saying, we're not here to save you, we're here to tell you…(and maybe not event that). Don't martyr yourself on a sign….in this world of movement, where we all are native to different languages (not just spoken ones but all systems of meaning) you might just crucify yourself on the wrong cross. I think my Mom taught me that. Ayn Rand didn't crucify herself on the wrong cross, but people did later——WE DID——through the failure of language in the post-modern age. And it's the fucking definition of a tragedy.

(Ancient and Modern) Technologies of Globalization and Identity Formation

 In this post I want to explore processes of social change and shifts in notions of identity that take place during globalizations or instances of cosmopolitanism, which aren’t as new as we sometimes think they are.

Christianity's origins as a sect are in the first few centuries of the Common Era, when it was one among many religious cults that worshiped a single god and were characterized by private, secretive, or exclusive rituals, and a certain degree of tension with the encompassing society (little known fact: the Isis cult was also suppressed and persecuted by some Roman Emperors, and yes, this included crucifixions. The cult of Dionysos was also persecuted by the Roman government in 186 BCE, when according to Roman historian Livy the rites were banned and some 7,000 adherents were either imprisoned or executed).

The mystery cult of Isis, as well as the cult of Dionysos, were popular and spread across the entire Roman Empire by the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, which it's worth noting was at that time at it's height of geographical expanse. This is no coincidence—these cults that centered around "foreign" gods (Egyptian and Greek, respectively) spread through trade and along the itineraries of Roman sailors, or through the movements of imperial armies, which were often stationed at the boundaries of the empire and in unstable provinces. Communication and physical travel—in those days of course one in the same—was more swift, reliable, and safe because of the infrastructure maintained by the Romans. Technically you could consider the Jesus movement a "foreign cult" too, since Palestine wasn't acquired by Rome until 63 CE. The Jesus movement stood out among the mystery cults because it arose within a Jewish context, was contingent on the sacred history and scriptures of the Israelites, and some (namely Rabbinic scholar Daniel Boyarin) argue was not that distinct from Judaism until the fourth century. Specifically, much of the distinction as been retroactively constructed by theologians and historians, often who have some degree of allegiance to one side or the other (which may or may not be conscious). In contrast to this, it helps to envision the Jewish religious landscape around the advent of the millennium as characterized by a wide range of sects, and Jewish Christians were merely one of the most messianic and apocalyptic of these. Rabbinic, or "Orthodox" Judaism developed out of this spectrum of Jewish religion just as Catholic Christianity did, and in fact, they played off of one other, using each other to demarcate the boundaries of orthodoxy and heresy. Such is the history of groups that actually have more in common than not—a sort of rhetorical coupling that produces discourses of difference.

One of the most interesting aspects of Christianity to scholars in our field, especially because we're looking back from our vantage point in the 21st century West, is that it essentially began as an underground, urban liberationist movement primarily patronized not by aristocrats but by the poor and illiterate. To compare early Christian theology with liberation theology is anachronistic but still a helpful comparison. Not only was Christianity an urban phenomenon, but the urban centers in which the cult thrived were part of a "globalization" set in motion by imperial conquest. In this case it was due to colonial domination by the Roman Empire, but the Hellenistic period, inaugurated by Alexander's eastward conquests is analogous. Throughout the history of civilization, globalizations differ proportionally and are constrained by the communication, transportation, and military technologies of the time, but significant elements remain in common.

I concur with Wikipedia's current definition of globalization, which is "processes of international integration arising from increasing human activity and interchange of worldviews, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture."

"International" is an apt word to describe globalization today, but one can find these processes as agents of cultural change long before the rise of the nation-state. I think globalization is any instance where some sort of common technology is used to unite economies and cultures who don't share the same ethnic, national, or religious identity, and of course, don't necessarily live in the same region. Today this technology might be the internet, and systems that it enables, like global banking. There are several primary technologies who's synergy produces our current notions of globalization—telecommunications and transportation are two big ones. However, there's another that I'm leaving out, perhaps the most important of all. Language! Language—and what it enables, which are world-views—constitutes technology, in my view. And this is exactly what allowed both Hellenistic and Roman culture to assimilate so many other cultures, and to flourish, and adapt....for example, in Greece in the 3rd century BCE, if you learn the "programming language" (the Greek language) then you are no longer considered a barbarian... you can now plug in and be an agent ("programmer") of culture, and not an outsider. Roman culture proved even more "open source", and perhaps post-industrial capitalism even more so—although there is a dark side to "universal language".

 It is easy of course to perceive today's globalization as definitive, or somehow comprehensive. This is far from the truth. Objectively, globalization is always to some degree an illusion because inevitably there are "invisible" groups that are, for a wide variety of reasons, either not included at all or are somewhat included but are not beneficiaries of "globalization" and therefore don't perceive it in the same way as the "globalizers". This is not to say that these processes of integration are not two-way, and that the categories of "conqueror" and "conquered" are rigid and polar. There is no such thing as complete cultural assimilation or rejection—contact with "others" fuels culture, and it always has. But perhaps what is most interesting to me is not the physical or geographic details of these processes but perceptions of these "processes of integration" by those who are part of that "globalizing" culture, whether it is Ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, or the United States, to name a few. It is necessary, then, to talk about the consciousness(es) engendered by globalizing processes and the social constructions of notions of culture and empire. As you can see, globalization and imperialism go hand in hand. Not surprisingly, empire is often wrought in the name of unity and peace and processes of globalization are seen as a beneficial, civilizing force. One ironic part of it seems to be that as empire unfurls, whether in physical or digital space, it eventually becomes unstable, it can't be centrally governed in a top-down way. I almost want to compare it to a virus that kills the host, but that sounds too negative. What seems to happen is that the "host" relinquishes power eventually and the "language" of empire, which can't be contained by virtue of it being language, spawns other, new "hosts" and/or gets co-opted, altered and hacked.

But it's true that today's globalization integrates far more, in sheer numbers, than ever before. So of course, it is unique. An interesting aspect of the industrial city in 20th century is how it was so good at producing interest groups, coalitions born out of the fragmentation of time and space, and the unmooring of the individual person from their colonial homesteads. New identities came out of this, neo-tribalisms born from the simultaneous closeness and distance of people. Then in the post-industrial age and the 21st century, urban space wasn't necessarily physical anymore because of the internet. Cyberspace was the new, hyper-urban space. And today, I'd contend, the condition of cyberspace destabilizes the dichotomy of "urban" and "rural", at least in the U.S. and Europe.

Still, parallels can be drawn between this instance of globalization and, for example, the Hellenistic period. After the conquests of Alexander, the Greek Empire was socially, politically, and economically destabilized and as cosmopolitanism rose, local institutions became less cohesive. But again, new solutions to the need for group/tribe arose, and some scholars (like Ross Kraemer) would point to the subsequent rise of certain mystery cults as evidence of this.

Interestingly enough, individualism and "identity", which we place so much value on in the U.S., emerge from new forms of collectivity, I think—though sometimes they are subtle, noetic, hard to spot. I think this was true of Christianity. What enabled the early Christian martyrs to stand strong alone in the face of unspeakable torture was their understanding of the ways in which their identities were collective in nature—their representation of an idea much larger than themselves is the very thing that enabled them to make a such a declarative and all-encompassing statement about their personhood. The famous confession in the face of Roman persecutors "I am a Christian" is actually a group identity manifesting as individual identity. Is this the individuality that we so often piously lay at the feet of Christian culture? I don't know—it appears to me that individuality as many folks understand it today just doesn't exist. Please know that this is not an insult to Christianity or some sort of argument for brainwashing—for if you know my affinity with the politics of libertarian socialism and social ecology you'll understand that this corroborates the Zapatista notion that the only way to achieve true individuality is through the collective. And let me qualify the use of "true" here. "True individuality" simply stands for a positive, inspiring feeling of individual purpose. It is phenomenological and subjective. One has to be positioned within a network of nodes, or companer@s, who can reflect your position in the group back to you, and also hold "you" in place so that you can even pin your "identity" down. Without some form of this system, you can expect a degree of existential despair—especially in modern/civilized contexts, because when you aren't grounded by other people and common activities that relate somehow to survival (which can be variously defined) you are basically free-floating in an infinite oblivion. There's nothing wrong with that, but if  you want to play that game, there's a group identity for that, too! (It's called monasticism)

And yet, the Borg are NOT the apotheosis of this "communist" logic—although many conservatives would love to have you believe that. Today, Protestant Christianity is famously associated with our modern notions of freedom and individuality that are ostensibly pillars of a great society. Well, maybe this is true, I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I would just like to point out that Christianity, just like all cults or groups that end up revolutionizing culture and mobilizing very very strong personal notions of identity and purpose are at their root socialist movements. And as for how this applies to modern culture... I would emphasize that the networks by which personal notions of identity and agency are achieved are sometimes invisible, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Notions of personhood that we take to be individual are often products of innovations in affinity and coalitional behavior. There is no agency in a vaccuum. Agency is the emergent end-product of a vast and complex system that is hive-like. It's just hard for us end-users to see.