You talk about the break-out space of the bureaucratic office, a discussion in hushed voices, and you connect the tacit demand for body-lessness from such an environment to a subterranean demand for (a kind of) mind-lessness. The connection between the two demands exists because, as you quite rightly observe,

it isn’t the simple lack of embodied feelings (desire, restlessness) but to some extent a prohibition on personality that the bureaucratic office enforces. In the office, one isn’t expected to call up a sense of one’s own ideas of right, past a certain level of seniority, but rather one’s ideas of how the organisation would do it. The more encultured we are (and progression is absolutely a sieve for cultural fit), the more likely it is that even disagreements are framed around whether it ‘should be done that way here’. In our daily work, we hold responsibilities rather than perform any active duty.

Yes, immoral mazes, yes.

Today, I want to (try to) see a little more of the forest, at the predictable expense of the trees. In a sense, the hushed-giggle debate about fecal microbiome transfer is a microsociology of the bureaucratic. But if this is true, then where should we look for a viable path to a non-violent alternative? Aside from the thick description of the disembodied Zoom Perfect Worker, how might we begin to situate ourselves in terms of an alternative? Insofar as we seem to be struggling to articulate any positive alternative vision, why are we struggling? If ‘the bureaucratic’ is an abstractum that can be understood in terms of its concreta, why is the non-bureaucratic only accessible on the Straussian periphery of studies of fantasies (and suppositories) generated by that same harmful bureaucratic? Why is any hypothetical Good And Earnest Alternative so slippery? Why so always-out-of-view?

Today, the best answer I can give to these questions is in terms of a Death-Metal-like metaphor.

Early in Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust of this Planet, there’s a passage which gestures—in the specific—towards the problem that I think we’re jointly facing. It’s a long passage, for which I (as usual) apologise, but I may as well begin by extracting it in full:

Whereas in traditional occult philosophy, the world is hidden in order that it is revealed (and revealed as the world-for-us), in occult philosophy today the world simply reveals its hiddenness to us. A second shift follows from this. Whereas traditional occult philosophy is a hidden knowledge of the open world, occult philosophy today is an open knowledge of the hiddenness of the world. Despite Agrippa’s criticisms of both science and religion, the orientation of his work remains within the ambit of Renaissance humanism. For Agrippa it is not only possible for humanity to gain knowledge of the world, but it is also possible for humanity to, by virtue of occult practices, obtain a higher “union” with the “Maker of all things.” Today, in an era almost schizophrenically poised between religious fanaticisms and a mania for scientific hegemony, all that remains is the hiddenness of the world, its impersonal “resistance” to the human tout court. Hence, in traditional occult philosophy knowledge is hidden, whereas in occult philosophy today the world is hidden, and, in the last instance, only knowable in its hiddenness. This implies a third shift, which is the following: whereas traditional occult philosophy is historically rooted in Renaissance humanism, the new occult philosophy is anti-humanist, having as its method the revealing of the non-human as a limit for thought…

If there is one foundational claim which underpins the outlook I have right now, as a result of our recent exchange of letters, it’s the following. Thacker thought he was making an observation about the history of ‘occult philosophy’. He was wrong. He was making an observation about Western culture in general. And what he calls anti-humanist is better rendered as anti-human.

Today, ‘occult philosophy’ is taken to be a pretty weird subject. One result of its weirdness is that, for someone like Eugene Thacker, it’s a (relatively) socially acceptable place onto which he can project otherwise-unacceptable observations. It’s much like schizophrenia was for Gregory Bateson et al. in the 1950s.

Thacker is noticing a general pattern. It only seems specific.

Once, long ago, human intellectual life was driven by the assumption that it was possible to gain knowledge of the world. This was not just true in the natural and special sciences, but in every corner of human experience. The basic, shared understanding—the closest thing to a human universal—was that hidden, secret, occluded things could be rendered visible through coöperative human effort. Problems could be solved. Scarcity could be overcome. Through collective work—humans believed—we could able to shed light on things and take advantage of our then-clearer view. Connected to this, importantly, creation was a robust good. Building, making, repairing. Especially creating new humans (children). All, on this view, basically, by default, good.

Now, in middle- and upper-class postmodernity, the totalising version of such a view is ridiculed. All that remains is a kind of elaborate signalling game which enables (and enacts) fractal-like patterns of dominance (and covert rent extraction). For the most part, what people mean by ‘truth’ is ‘power’; what people mean by ‘secret’ is ‘dangerous to know’. For the vast majority, humanist and enlightenment values exist as only empty names: politicised fictions, used for signalling alliances. The people who endorse them earnestly—some would say ‘naively’—are gaslit, ridiculed, and scapegoated by the powerful. Insofar as a geniune non-ironic, anti-scarcity, pro-real-creation-of-material-wellbeing sect exists, it’s been driven into enclaves. Tiny groups of scattered, confused ‘weirdos’. Largely disconnected from one another; perpetually on the knife-edge between ‘ignored’ and ‘ostracised’. These folks are (rightly) terrified of the world. [I think it’s fair to say that you and I are both members of the sect.]

As our letters have progressed, I’ve begun to realise that at least one thing we seem to share is a subterranean refusal coupled with a open suspicion: an unspoken unwillingness to be quite so smug as to ridicule genuine enlightenment values, paired with a confusion about what’s actually happening around us when so many groups of people profess-but-seem-to-profane those same values. If privacy is a thing people claim to care about, why so much pointless surveillance? If suffering is a thing to reduce, um, hey, what the fuck is with all the factory farming? If life is good and should continue, why so many reckless existential risks?

My sense is that we both feel, on some level, that the recent turn in culture—towards the present situation, in which it’s the unstated majority opinion that the world is zero-sum and “only knowable in its hiddenness”—is a catastrophic mistake.

I notice that I feel an inability to pinpoint (a) a precise alternative to the modern ‘bureaucratic’ ontology, in (b) few words, which (c) everyone would agree to, except with reference to fantasy and fiction and microsociologies of the bureaucratic thing that my hypothetical alternative is ‘not’.

I think this inability is itself a symptom of the (deeper) same.

The occluded truth is that most of the world is pro-death. At least in the ‘Eugene Thacker talking about occult death metal’ sense of things. Modern institutions have become mechanisms for traumatising their participants into a state of predictability. They have also become mechanisms which distribute a cornucopia of propaganda with one message: the only ‘real’ freedom is the freedom of the void.

Traumatised into endless aspiration towards the aristocratic, most of us postmoderns have been taught to face existential threats, not with the steely-eyed determinism of a hunter-gatherer who solves real problems (and might, she reasons, solve this one, too), but with a kind of relentless angst. A helpless waiting for death, or something that is metaphorically like it.

The thing we sometimes call ‘Late Capitalism’ pathologises independence, curiosity, energy, and attention. It naturalises trauma.

From Kegan to Friston, Pinker to Peterson, one can trace a trend: a ‘trustworthy’ agent is taken to mean ‘a predictable agent’, even if ‘predictable’ means ‘predictably self-destructive and irrational’. Modern institutions want you to be a reliable agent who does not process information; one who has no epistemic state. A well-oiled cog in the social superstructure, willing to subjugate yourself to the needs of the collective. Not really an agent for any natural meaning of the word, I know. But certainly something that can be put to good use (by the superstructure) in elaborate games to gain and maintain territory.

At the limit, predictability is death.

It seems to me that, in such a cultural environment, any positive alternative must come from somewhere ‘outside’. It must be an account of the alternatives that exist in the world as seen from a boost higher up the orthogonal axis mundi. It must be Heraclitean. It’s for this reason that I struggle to find the words: we write, and speak, and ask for freedom, but we do so in the language of the King.

To see the harmful thing up close is to see it as endless, light-blocking, fearsome. A thing from which to hide. To see it from afar, in its world, in terms of its incentives, is to see it as simpler and less dangerous. A monster to be tamed or slain, or just another thing on the landscape. I also think this might by why rationalists use such flowery language sometimes: it’s a kind of altitude-in-metaphor.

So we must necessarily write from beyond and outside in order to become, again, agents with epistemic state. To be able to be trusted to coöperate to gain knowledge of the actual world, and to then advantage of that knowledge for positive-sum ends, we need to find a bit of distance. Out beyond the pain, the trauma, and the culture-wide (metaphorical) death wish. There, we can be creative, again, finally. Unpredictable.