Search for Magic in the World of Technic

It can be a special kind of exhaustion to exist in the world where everything needs to be measured, optimized, and productive. Federico Campagna in his book, “Technic and Magic” taxanomizes this weariness by calling it a “world of technic”: we are experiencing a reality-system which has transformed existence itself into a sequence of positions within a chain of interminable production. The book is a map of a prison that has become our total reality and we have forgotten how completely locked in we are.

A student of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Campagna inherits from his teacher a certain sensitivity to the fact that capitalism not only exploits our labor, but also colonizes our categories of thought. However, where Berardi is concerned with the psychopathologies that cognitive capitalism generates, Campagna takes it further, into the metaphysical underpinnings themselves. His question is: what is the reality-system that makes a human being what he terms an “abstract general entity”, a being that is a mere reproducible pattern in a series, and not an individual, self-sustaining presence. People are no longer present in Technic as distinct individuals; people are present as arrangements of quantifiable “roles, competencies, data-points, performances”, distributed in various systems.

The solution, he opines, is to comprehend the five "hypostases" of Technic, its chain of emanations that organize the appearance of the world to us. It starts with “absolute language”, where truth is representation, and representation is truth. Things no longer merely exist, but they only “are or not the case” within linguistic series. Out of there comes “measure”, which divides the world into positions that can be infinitely replicated. Then there is the “unit” or piece of information, the basic form in which the world presents itself to be used as an instrument. Then there is the abstract general entity (AGE) the pattern of activations that substitutes what we used to think of as a subject or a person. Lastly, there is the issue of vulnerability, which is “life”, the problem that must be resolved, the challenge that needs to be surmounted via endless innovation.

It is a gloomy picture, yet it is genius of Campagna to make it seem like something we actually live in. Who has not become a mere LinkedIn profile, credit rating, productivity rate? Who has not felt that strange temporality, in which each moment is characterized simply as late--as not fast enough? This observation, pointing out that "within Technic, what is truly present is only the series-system itself", is something vital about the modern state of alienation which is lost in more conventional criticism.

The most interesting thing about Technic and Magic is that Campagna does not end with critique. He uses a wide range of sources, including Islamic philosophy, Neoplatonism, Bhartrhari's Sanskrit grammar, and depth psychology by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, to depict a different reality-system, which he terms Magic. It is not occultism or wish-fulfilment, it is a real metaphysical alternative, a different way of structuring reality which preserves what Technic destroys: the ineffable aspect of things, the “this-ness” of things that cannot be measured and reproduced.

The cosmology of magic is also presented in the form of five hypostases, starting with the ineffable (what he refers to as “life”) next to language as symbolic and not instrumental, then to persons as unique manifestations of the ineffable, not as patterns, and finally to a world that is organized by meaning and not information. Where Technic sees positions in series, Magic perceives centers, places of sacredness where the axis mundi bridges various dimensions of existence.

The points of reference here go deep into esotericism. It echoes Ibn Arabi’s idea of the “unity of existence” (wahdat al-wujud), in which multiplicity and unity do not contradict each other. The effects of the work of Mircea Eliade on sacred space and profane time are ubiquitous. Campagna appeals to the Neoplatonic tradition of theurgy not as a superstition, but as a mode of transformation that enables one to render his or her existence an adequate vehicle of the ineffable. The similarities with the philosophy of Mulla Sadra, in which knowing and being are synonymous, influence his perception of the possibility of the adoption of the reality-system of Magic.

However, the most intriguing action of the book goes in its practical implications. In contrast to revolutionary programs, which can guarantee to uproot Technic by mass action, Campagna, in the footsteps of his anarchist inclination and inspired by such theorists as Max Stirner and Ernst Jünger, makes the case of individual adoption of Magic as a reality-frame. This is no mere escapism; it is a strategic withdrawal. He appeals to the Sufi methods of taqiyya and kitmān (concealment and dissimulation), and the counsel of Baltasar Gracián to the wise man living under tyranny: “Know how to be all things to all people.” Adjust to the surface and retain an inner wilderness that Technic is helpless before.

This could pass off as quietism, yet there is a certain radicalism here. Campagna is insinuating that the fundamental battle is not over who owns the means of production but rather categories through which we experience reality itself. In a world like that of Technic, where becoming is the ultimate principle, and everything is only potentiality to become again, the insistence of Magic on the element of eternity in everything will indeed be subversive.

The analogy to other writings of this tradition is educative. Campagna contrasts not only the analysis but a different metaphysics with Martin Heidegger critique of technology as “Gestell” (enframing). Opposing Giorgio Agamben, who focuses on bare life and states of exception, he demands a positive view of what life can be. Campagna offers something more difficult to disregard, even despite the documentation of psychic catastrophe by his teacher Berardi of cognitive capitalism, hope, or at least consolation.

That consolation matters. In one of the most decisive observations of the book, Campagna writes that the reality-system of Magic  "aims to console those who adopt it, by rebuilding their experience of themselves and of the world in a way that reveals to them their condition of eternal and preexisting salvation." This is no hollow assurance; it is the acknowledgment that in a world where revolutionary change appears more and more impossible, where we are hopelessly defeated by history, that the only kind of dignity that remains is the transformation of one’s own experience system.

Does this work? Is it possible to use a different reality system and still live in the world that is organized according to Technic? The key to the answer used by Campagna, who borrows the philosophy of “as if”, by Hans Vaihinger, is that we treat the world “as if” it were constructed based on the principles of Magic, but we are consciously aware that it is not. It is the contradiction of his project: to be in the world of Technic (because we must) and out of it (because we can).

The book will not please those who want tangible political programs or strategy of revolution. But that may be its virtue. And the most extreme gesture in an age of compulsory optimizing is, I think, nothing more radical than the refusal of the basic categories according to which that optimizing functions, the insistence, quiet and stubborn, that there is something in existence beyond presence, something in the self beyond that which can be captured in the logic of production.

Campagna has created a survival book to people who feel the prison and yet are unable to get out of it. At times it is enough to survive. Sometimes it's everything.