Instrumentalizing Politics by Secreting Delirious Effluences

When we pose the question whether a sudden emergency situation can lead to or bring about permanent changes in politics, the seemingly evident answer would be ‘yes’. However, it also implies a quite different question: can any emergency or liminal situation turn to become permanent? Such a turn might be accidental, but it can also be purposefully orchestrated, just as liminal situations can also be forced. This is why there was the restriction in the Law, more precisely in Roman Law, to give a one-year limit to such extraordinary measures (as in Stephen Turner 2021: 51, using Carl Schmitt). While the agents of such artificial moves could be called either parasites or tricksters, those who have a tendency to take over politics through various media and other means of political communication, with such an idea we are still only at a surface level. So we need to pose a further question: how is it that under such conditions politics itself becomes a technologized disease that can act without a mover and can move without an action, but be consistent, upfront and publicly coordinated? It thus becomes incommensurable, the negation of regularities, gaining a pure dynamism of its own, which can quickly lead into the multiplication and amplification of any growth, undermining commensurability or ratio, promoting generalizing, universalistic, even eschatological solutions. Clearly, we are interested in automatised technology, beyond the question of a concrete epidemic or disease.

Through calling attention to the fact that emergencies might be exaggerated or even purposefully mongered we can move to a deeper level and address the animating spirit of destruction, the desire for annihilation, deeply rooted in history, and this is alchemic technology. When politics becomes combined with the annihilating spirit of alchemic technology, the result is political alchemy, which is extracting delirious effluences for its own purposes of new system building. However, while alchemy is well-known to work through decontextualization, using chemical processes to isolate elements out of their own place and context, and finally to recombine them new ones, politics was originally and must essentially be about something else: about maintaining and guarding the coherence of the political body. Instead, political alchemy results in a hybridized state through decontextualization and the subsequent loss of memory, undermining the substance and coherence of political entities, leading to suffering due to their deprivation of authentic existence: ‘the Leap into Evil’, as in Kierkegaard (2013: 205–06) coined it in his analysis of Macbeth. But a useful grounding for delirious effluences that secrets every decontextualizing wrecking is the liminal (Griffin 2018, Chapter 4, using Victor Turner).

Effluences were first described by the pre-Socratic philosopher or physiologist Empedocles, and later Plato also wrote about it in Meno. The idea is that every matter owns, produces and secrets a quantity of effluences during their lives, an activity that is intensified in certain specific moments, like in relation to love and death, or in liminal situations, as we now would say. Effluences are commensurate with perception, images, colours, odours and hearing, and in fact for the Antique authors perception is equal with sensuality with the high or low flux of vibrating effluences. Later the Neoplatonists used the notion of effluences in their divinisation practices, concerning how to gain access to the power of effluences, how to encounter with this particular flux manifestation of matter, also called as spirits. The Neoplatonist enquiry went parallel with the growing interest in magic and alchemy, which was used by figures who always lived on the borderline of legitimacy, having a merchant spirit and tried to gain a fortunate by provoking illegal transformations, the multiplication of matter and the production of new species by spiritual means. This is why they were banned and illegitimate for over two millennia, when suddenly in the seventeenth century they gained legitimacy and with such alchemists, like Newton or Boyle a new science began to grow on the decontextualizing basis of alchemy, called the method of fluxion, focusing on the all-pervading effluences of matter that produced nervous stimuli, sensation, light and heat. This is how the transmutation of matter became a legitimate scientific enquiry, transforming more and more entities through cloning, duplications and transmutations into hybridity, until an awkward, borderline activity turned into the mainstream and became an overwhelming activity, openly and publicly coordinated under the misleading name of natural sciences. Since its asserted aim, the transmutation of identities never changed, it gradually sickened us all and maddened us all with hunger for the next identity to be caught and transformed.

The reason for such transformative power is that only effluences are able to change matter by entering and – equally importantly – by leaving it. Effluences are the only force in nature that cause kinetic energy, movement, light and heat. In their compressed form effluences are either magnetic or are spiralled into gravity, the basic logic being that the vibration of effluences is compressed into conducting spaces. This can be captured through the terms ‘flux’ and ‘void’: the flux of effluences is directed into specifically prepared empty spaces, or incubators, which act like matrices of non-linear transformation (an example for the original matrix of linear transformation is the womb). What started as a spiritual upheaval, when a moment of ecstasy (ek-statis, or a stepping out of one’s solid being) started to spin up emotions, producing effluences that were the matter of the natural world, now became turned into a purposefully animated process, where nothing hindered those adventurous and mercantile minds to intrude into natural processes and spin them there where they wanted to arrive – gaining influence (from effluences), money, fame and especially prestige. This went on until the last entity to decompose was reached, the atoms, called exactly as they were thought to be a-tomos, undividable and indecomposable, which however they also succeeded to destabilise by decomposing molecules, and thus every composed forms, and turn them through recombination into corrupted, dependable entities without their own solidity and movement, as if becoming parasites, waiting for the impulses that can direct them into various, centrally assigned activities. Parasites, decompositions and corrupted matter are unfortunately animated by lucid dreams, and what is more, even have a demonical version, where not only the dreamers are aware that they are dreaming, but also the world of demons become aware of such presence in the dream, with their eager hunger for annihilating possession.

So, we can conclude that through modern alchemic technology effluences are generating new pathways towards new compounds and new species, that are produced even more intensively in times of disintegration, uncertainty, corruption or sensual upheavals, in emergency liminal situations, diseases and viruses not being excluded, rather we can safely bet that such emergencies will become ever more frequent, an inevitable consequence of the excitation of effluences. Ever since politics started to deal with delirious effluences like revolutions and totalitarian systems as something highly desirable, and also as something legitimate for producing new compounds, such new-system-making has become entrapped in a vicious circle consisting of self-animating decontextualization, disintegration and corruption. The more technological waste is produced, we are more and more enslaved and humiliated as we have become dependent on the clearing of such waste and intoxication by technology, but in this way only the further production of waste and intoxication is stimulated. This is because technology cannot produce anything else than what it’s essence: disintegrated waste by spiritual means, placing heaps of rubbish layer after layer on the top of each other.  In this way one layer of technological waste is placed on the top of the previous layers, until the whole will fall down by its own weight, to our downward self-transcendence.

References

Griffin, Roger (2018) Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kierkegaard, Søren (2013) Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 2, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Macbeth, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Turner, Stephen (2021) The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals’, in G. Delanty (ed.), Pandemics, Politics, and Society, Critical Perspectives on the Covid-19 Crisis, Berlin: De Gruyter.

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