Virus Magic, or about the amplification of an unknown factor

The unknown factor is a variable in a conditional equation in mathematics; it is the quantity which is to be discovered by solving an equation (This is a follow-up article to those published in the 20 September, 13 October, 6 November and 24 November issues of VoegelinView). It is a curious thing whose action and effects are unpredictable, or almost that: it is an undefinable target. However, in so far as magic has occurred, no matter how unknown, and strange its virulence, just as any abnormality, it was always surrounded by the same attributes, masks, and parasitic appearance,[1] so this outsider always has around itself the same comrades and the same commanders, namely tricksters and mischief-makers. Historically, such magic was identified as demonic, later called as technology (see Illich 1982; Stirk and Stivers 2001), but it is even better to call it as the utilisation of an unknown factor. Still, apart from the interest people took in this unknown factor and its relations to their concerns, which was often the case, only modernity felt an inexplicable attraction to it on a mass scale, managing to industrialize and mechanize demonic technology. While many were aware of its deadly influence,[2] still, when their experiences encountered growth, comfort, and abundance, they too accepted it, or at least resigned themselves to this something wondrous unknown before. Everybody then seemed to have accepted that there must be some reason why this unknown gained such a merit and ceased to concern themselves with the perils of its wonders. However, now, due to the actual processes of disease prevention and its enormous stakes, that came on the top of various concerns about falsifying reality (Artificial Intelligence, algorithms, and similar replacements of the real), we must overcome our reluctance and take a sneak preview of these perils, peeking into the abyss, looking into the secret and hidden, because we have now arguably arrived at the peak, the pointed summit of the unknown factor.

The virus, this propelled missile of the unknown, became the source of a collective neurosis, the fear of a loss of control over ourselves, a collective obsession stimulated by various social stressors – exploited by the media and other marketers, political or economic: seeking to fill empty hearts with delirious effluences, yet their sources remained indefinite. Forget social control, conspiracy, surveillance or data protection, Davos-ian Gnosticism[3] and even the Foucauldian plague model, that according to him became prevalent in modern biopolitics: this marvellous moment when political power is exercised to the full, when plague is met by order, discipline, hierarchy, self-existent and self-acting monitoring and tracking, progressing devices that enable all our movements to be followed, our conversations recorded, and our personal data compromised, scoring in the adjacent fields and lanes for autonomic understanding, taking over the accustomed place of comprehension. There is something significantly worse than total control, and this is transformation.[4] This could imply transfiguration (transforming for glorification); transmogrification (replacement of the authentic by a grotesque copy) or metamorphosis (a magical transformation, implying a complete change of physical form or substance), which is the nearest to the burning, metallurgic-alchemical brick-kilns. A sad transformation, too, as concrete individuality is thus lost forever, the character has faded away, inner force and the other attributes of the person having either been cut off or completely overthrown by an alien ‘personality’. In order to illustrate this point, let me show the character killing, the universalising and transcendental effect of the all-powerful transformer number in mathematics, the 0, which exerts a totalising influence on all numerical phenomena in space and time, best visible in the current digital replacement. The 0 is a self-existent and self-moving cosmic principle. The 0 maps and describes the unknown factor, to which magic orientates itself,[5] that creates out of nothing, and that has a controlling will over mathematical operations.

It is at the time of the shift from Roman numerals to the Arabic ones, from the 14th century onwards, that the usage of the number of magic, the 0, from the Orient became slowly established Europe, through a gradual process of using place-keepers instead of fixed values (see Barrow 2001, Kaplan 2000). However, as the 0 is a flexible numeral that can be put to many uses, helping to perform operations of substitution and exchange that otherwise would be much more complicated, it had a considerable success in merchant use. The same kind of amplified growth repeated itself through the use of recursive infinite series, brought to Europe again from the Orient (implying a magical source) by the Italian merchant Fibonacci around 1200, where each number in the series is the sum of the two previous ones. His famous examples is about the magical growth of a rabbit population: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. (see Devlin 2017). The peculiarity of this series is that growth is produced through adding the two preceding numbers only, thus the previous numbers as if vanish.[6] This evokes the alchemical logic of creative destruction: that any entity can be extended without any limit, if destroyed periodically. Where a process is repeated (with an input from the previous application of the process), and its output is discarded once it became entered into the next application, the process gets infinity as a result. We have endless rabbits, by mechanically multiplying them, without any limit, and so we arrive at the concept of infinity! The zero was addressing the infinity of the cosmos, making use of liminality (the placing of something on the limit), which transforms every entity. Such voiding of existence results in collaboration with control, surveillance or hunger for data, in discipline, hierarchy, monitoring and tracking, acquiescence with the progressing of devices that enables all our movements to be followed, our conversations recorded, and our personal data compromised. They are side effects, they keep us low, but do not necessary transform us. Transformation can only be performed through the void, like the virus magic, which accelerates death, through an infinite expansion. In any event, the question is an old one: the proliferation of the void through the zero has overthrown life itself, attaching to it the ‘post’ prefix (see post-human, after post-modern and the like), under the name of transcendentality.

Transcendentality or preternaturality, the overcoming of the solidity of entities can be realised by merging units to form larger entities, and then by merging the merged entities themselves to form even larger entities, and so on. In this manner we arrive at the sublunary heart of metallurgy and similar technological practices that started to develop in an industrial level at the time of the 17th century. Since then, technology keeps growing and growing, and there is really nothing here in material world to stop it from growing further. Its basic logic (recursive repetition) has never changed: the idea that the output of each stage can be applied as the input in the succeeding stage, producing a swelled variant. In the meantime, technological magic enlarged the circle of its victims, which now includes the whole material world, up to its smallest atoms. When the destruction of the atom was discovered, a new initiative started its circle, the discovery of the energy of wavelength, in the 19th century, which in fact does not correspond anymore to physical reality[7] at all. The energy of wavelength furnished us with flights of fancy to surpass the laws of nature with eternal comfort. Energy does not make sense in terms of reality, as it has a mismatch with reality,[8] with the fabric of meaning itself. It rather resembles chaos, the abyss of Tartarus.[9]

We argue that contemporary disease prevention provides reasons to believe that things pushed into liminality are ready for transformation, but also that their voided existence is a fertile ground for evoking cosmic, transcendental energies, the kind of delirious effluences that are increasingly controlling our world, by escalating a certain indiscriminate emotionality that only promotes abstract, universalising endeavours, beyond the realm or order and nature, in the name of redressing certain perceived inequalities and suffering. Such delirious effluences are fundamental to secure broad support in order to keep the destructive and homogenising technological machine growing: like the drumming up of emotional support for unlimited freedom – which supports the destruction of all meaningful and stable order; for perfect equality – which again eliminates any distinction; or the elimination of any suffering – which only produces unprecedented suffering on a mass scale, as the wars, revolutions and totalitarian regimes of the past centuries amply demonstrate.

Here the virus stands for the unknown factor, the void itself: a self-existing, self-acting amplifier. The void is used for the transformation of entities, to make them larger or more powerful, to increase them, presumably to make them ‘better’ and ‘healthier’, the falsity of which lies (no doubt) in that the void lets slip reality into transcendentality. Accepting a growth taking place through the void, however, is entirely misleading, as it amplifies every entity through parasitic means, and the resulting growth and well-being therefore is illusory. The virus behaves just like the void, it produces a growth by amplifying cells, exaggerating them into annihilation.

Keeping in mind that identities are not in fact completely fixed or finite (on the infinite, see Plato’s Philebus, 16-8),[10] the point is that one cannot judge and govern an entity that has a conviction, an inner strength, firmness, and content, through abstract measurements. Therefore, there are two existences, the finite and the infinite, but only one of them is true.

Infinity is worm-hole, a hole made by a burrowing worm which attacks identities, tunnelling itself into bodies with the cooperation of other parasitical attackers and starting to occupy the host body, transforming it into a different entity by reproducing itself inside, this is why it produces an amplification effect. Curiously, this is the same modality as how virus functions – it attacks, taking the image of the attacked, miming it and burrowing inside for reproduction, then replaying the whole game at another location, with the cooperation of still other parasitic attackers. The opening of Hell as a metaphor for the infinite is quite obvious at the start of the mathematician Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland,[11] where this weird world can be entered by passing through the mirror above the chimney in Alice’s house. The magical mirror reflects reality, and so imitates it, but also annihilates it by substituting it, which then starts growing into an emptiness, the swallow grotesque of the infinite; an inverse of a square law (as in square deal).  Magic is clearly present here, in this ambiguous and challenging work of art, denigrated into children literature, just as Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; one heaping paradoxes and contradictions upon each other that are intended to call attention to the status of the infinite as a separate world.

What’s more, as this Wonderland has a fairly well specified range of intrinsic gloominess, its fanatism and obstinacy accelerate as effluences increase in frequency. When magic is shattering the borders of Hell, these sad and blackened pieces are falling on our head. The shattered bits of Hell were then reproduced on an industrial scale by wavelength, radiation, computers, artificial intelligence; all in all, by a literal invasion and occupation of our reality by the unknown factor.

In closing, let us take a glance at the centuries of modernity, with the invasion of magic as it took place in literature (in absurd: Jarry, Ionescu), in philosophy (in sorcery: Hegel, Marx), in the natural sciences (in searching for the unknown factor, new physics). The same hellish automatism strikes back in all of them that thrives for entities to be occupied in order to grow, that has been stuffing us with its confounded mass. One of them is the virus, which is a modality of the unknown factor, multiplied by technological magic, the hateful annihilator of every living, which gains surplus by producing effluences and exploits our souls for its cunning unreason.

 

References

Barrow, John D. (2001) The Book of Nothing, New York: Vintage

Carroll, Lewis (1992) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, New York, NY: Vintage.

Détienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant (1978) Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press

Devlin, Keith (2017). Finding Fibonacci: The Quest to Rediscover the Forgotten Mathematical Genius Who Changed the World, Princeton University Press.

Huxley, Aldous (2005) Ape and Essence, New York, NY: Vintage.

Illich, Ivan (1982) Medical Nemesis, New York, NY: Alfred Knopf.

Kaplan, Robert. (2000). The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lord Hewart of Bury (1929) The New Despotism, London: Ernst Benn.

Natale, Simone (2019) Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Stirk, Peter and Stivers, Richard (2001) Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational, London: Bloomsbury.

Voegelin, Eric (1972) ‘On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery’, in J. T. Fraser, F. Haber & G. Muller (eds.) The Study of Time, New York, NY: Springer, 418-51.

 

Notes

[1] See Détienne and Vernant (1978). Magic, the trickster, wearing masks, parasitism, and being an outsider are all closely intertwined

[2] One of the most important and relatively early efforts to identify technology with demonic magic was Goethe. See especially Faust Two, the first part of Act Five.

[3] A current set of influential discourse in the city of Davos of globalizers, who are curiously conscious of the ecological mutation, and all their efforts sounds rather gnostic transcendentalist universalisation, meaning the elimination of matter or its transformation to an unity of ethereal, pulsating sensuals.  Its resemblance to Hegelian Gnosticism is striking especially if we compare the ‘cunning of reason’ outcome in Communism and Fascism. See more about sorcery and Hegel in Voegelin (1972).

[4] One of the best descriptions of a silent, invisible transformation in politics is Lord Hewart of Bury’s The New Despotism (1929), capturing the way the subordination of Parliament is going through the evasion of the Courts, rendering the caprice of executive administration supreme.

[5] Magic orients itself to cosmic evolution, which it recognizes as cyclic, controlled by mechanical forces which tend towards equilibrium until a peak is reached, after which dissolution occurs, the universe reverts to a simpler state, and the cycle begins again. In this movement one can easily recognize the origin of the Gnostic Apocalypse itself.

[6] The Markov chain, on which many algorithms are based (see for e.g. stock market price behaviour, queueing at airports or toll plazas, or cruise control systems in cars), works in a similar manner.

[7] The fabric of the physical world is the space-time reality, a finitude that shares numerous properties with the unknown factor, the infinite as well. This hidden variable is the topic of this writing that enquires about the multiple components of magic present in the artificial (meaning technological) growth of the virus phenomenon.

[8] Not that we deny that energy has certain properties, and from such properties there evolved all the other properties of nature: matter, space, time. But energy cannot be separated from matter, in nature.

[9] In early Greek cosmology, chaos is either the primeval emptiness of the universe before things came into being or the abyss of Tartarus, the underworld. Note that the Greeks, quite rightly, had two words for ‘world’, identifying two different states of ‘the world’: cosmos (the world as being in order, measure, and harmony), and chaos (the world as being in disorder, or incommensurable liminality). The two are not ‘the same’, even if purportedly composed of the same particles; thus, a China set is not the same when whole, intact, and when it is broken to pieces. The latter, in fact, can no longer be called a ‘China set’. So can we call a disordered, fragmented, thoroughly destroyed world a ‘cosmos’? Weber discussed the same thing at the start of his Economy and Society, when he wrote that a society in order is not the same as when it is in an ‘out-of-ordinary’ state. It is for the latter situation that he developed his famous term ‘charisma’.

[10] The passage is about the void or emptiness, in every entity there is an infinity, the space of desire and free will. Desire is in a void or absence of something we want or need, and pleasure as it expressed by Socrates: when we are empty we are loved to be filled; “and considering that this (the mute, the void add the author) was a common bond which made them in a way all one, [18d]; that the vowel sounds in that infinity were not one, but many”), their wholeness is darkened by the empty spot inside, which is at the same time the space for free will, for chosen conviction or belief.

[11] Lewis Carroll’ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Strangely enough, originally Latin mundus meant exactly the same.