Hassan, Ihab 1973. The New Gnosticism: Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind. boundary 2 1(3): 546-570. [JSTOR]
Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable light. [The Tibetan Book of the Dead](Hassan 1973: 547)
Somewhat Spinozist.
Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness. [Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media](Hassan 1973: 547)
Somewhat Stapledonian.
But what do epigraphs prove?
Surely they do not answer an appeal to authority since few of us now accept the same authorities.
Do they evoke a mood, declare a theme, insinuate a conclusion? Possibly. Yet, coming at the start, they do nothing that the text itself will not confirm or deny. Thus epigraphs become a kind of preparation for failure. (Hassan 1973: 548)
I already like this author.
Or is the function of epigraphs to release metaphors and ideas from the bounds of a single time, place, and mind? Can quotation marks hold back a thought from seeking a larger identity in Thought? And what are the walls within Language made of? (Hassan 1973: 548)
Blowing. My. Mind.
Certainly, Consciousness has become one of our key terms, replacing Honor, Faith, Reason, or Sensibility as the token of intellectual passion, the instrument of our cultural will. Cold-eyed behaviorists may eschew the term; yet its nimbus still hangs over our rhetoric as we discourse of politics and pornography, language and literature, morality and metaphysics. Thus we "raise," "expand," "alter," "criticize," and "bracket," consciousness, among so many other things we do to it nowadays. (Hassan 1973: 549)
Downsizing "consciousness" from Thirdness to Firstness, or Secondness at best.
This cultural chatter may not be wholly idle. A certain dematerialization of our world is taking place, from the "ephemeralization" of substance (Buckminster Fuller) to the "de-definition" of art (harold Rosenberg). How many forms, disciplines, institutions, have we seen dissolve, in the last few decades, into amorphous new shapes? How many objects, solidly mattered, have we seen dissolve into a process, an image, a mental frame? (Hassan 1973: 549)
If this author only knew how dematerialized our world can really get (with computers and smartphones - basically the only materials one necessarily needs to survive). I think I've also already found "a title" - I usually eschew "a certain this or than" type phrases but this is solid.
The New York Times, October 22, 1972:The impact of the computer is felt in virtually every corner of American life, from the ghetto to the moon. And data-processing is the world's fastest growing major business; sometime during the next decade, it is expected to become the world's largest industry.From hardware to software, from software to pure mind? (Hassan 1973: 549)
One of the things that surprised me about Calhoun's (1972) schema (cf. Schwitzgebel 1970: 495) is the historical coincidence that 1984 was indeed approximately the time when Personal Computers broke through. Somehow these authors guessed that ~1984 there will be a turning point, and in a way there indeed was.
This process may be one of convergence far more than of dissolution. The "synoptic" force of consciousness is remarking our world in every way. As Teilhard de Chardin put it: "Everything that rises must converge." That is a hypothesis that we need, at least, to entertain. (Hassan 1973: 549)
The mind reworking its world? E.g. "recognizing man as the master of his own fate" (Kagalitski; Freling 1973: 66).
Eden and Utopia, the first and last perfection, are homologous imaginative constructs, mirror images of the same primal desire. Furthermore, the laws of myth and of science have this in common: both are partial codifications of reality, ways in which the mind imitates itself. Their structures, their functions, their predictive logic may not be identical; yet neither myth nor science escapes the influence of the imagination. (Hassan 1973: 550)
The mind imitates the Mind?
I think it more likely that "mystics" and "mechanists," as William Irwin Thompson calls them, will move toward a new issue:Western civilization is drawing to a close in an age of apocalyptic turmoil in which the old species, collectivizing mankind with machines, and the new species, unifying it in consciousness, are in collusion with one another to end what we know as human nature. (At the Edge of History)But the convergence which I speak manifests itself not only in broad cultural contexts; it finds a voice in private lives when least we expect it. (Hassan 1973: 551)
Hot damn are these passages loaded. Material collectivization vs mental unification.
Admittedly, two instances do not prove a trend. Yet the instances are scattered throughout our lives, as if each of us were compelling to discover his own Beulah, his own "place where Contrarieties are equally True." We have seen computer art aspire to Pythagorean mysteries. And even the dark avatars have disengaged themselves from our dreams to become, as in "2001: A Space Odyssey," technological prophecies. (Hassan 1973: 522)
As in... 2,500 years later we're trying to figure it out? Or, what?
Mary Shelley divines the point at which scientism and idealism, reason and revelation, meet. It is a point shrouded in terror. Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, surrenders to Albertus [|] Magnus and Paracelsus before he masters the exact sciences. "I was required," he says, "to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth." But his great error lies elsewhere. Self-absorbed and self-obsessed, he blights the powers of sympathy in himself. His solitary "fiend" returns to haunt him and haunt us, a ghastly embodiment of Prometheanism without responsibility or love. "Hateful day when I received life!" the fiend cries. Is that the curse of life born of pure mind? Frankenstein and his fiend are neither twain nor really one; but in this they are compacted: both together adumbrate the perils of consciousness in its (heroic-demonic) labors of self-creation. This Promethean adventure ends in a world not of fire but of ice. (Hassan 1973: 554-555)
Somehow, Frankenstein keeps on cropping up. This passage makes me think of the cursed Fourth Men, the giant brains without sympathy. Pure mind without love or feelings of any kind. It is a horror that recognizes its own horrid nature, in a way (scientific and objective), and recreates its predecessors upon an improved plan.
[Gerald] Feinberg [in The Prometheus Project] has fewer qualms about Prometheanism, about the increase of self-consciousness without bound. That increase is his project, and his Prometheus is ourselves. His premise is this: "My own feeling is that the despair of the conscious mind at the recognition of its own finitude is such that man cannot achieve an abiding contentment in his present form or anything like it. Therefore, I believe that a transformation of man into something very different from what he is now is called for." Calmly, lucidly, simplistically, Feinberg argues that mankind needs to set long-range ends for itself, and to devise corresponding means. The goal he proposes as the most likely human destiny is Promethean indeed: man will become a total consciousness. "Because of the inner logic of the conflict between the unity of one consciousness and the diversity of phenomena in the external world, there is probably no level of consciousness in which the conscious being will rest content until the sway of consciousness is extended indefinitely." We do not require the theology of Teilhard de Chardin to achieve this extension nor the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon. "I firmly believe," Feinberg notes, "that in trying to predict the future of technology, reality is likely to outstrip one's most extreme vision." The postmodern Prometheus reaches for the fire in distant stars. (Hassan 1973: 555)
"We don't need Stapledon", he says, while quoting someone who sounds exactly like Stapledon. Moreover, this is pretty much the outlook of the Third Men, the creators of the giant brains. And what is "total consciousness" after all? Is it endless self-supporting (axiomatic) thought, or is it thinking until no more thought is necessary? Consciousness? To reason oneself into the totality, into unification with oneness, as the pythagoreans had it, or... to achieve calm? Are we after Gordelphian maximalism or zen?
Hence Prometheanism remains the arch human endeavor for that "visionary company" of poets about whom Harold Bloom has so vividly written. Yes, there are acute dangers: solipsism, willfulness, self-corruption. (Hassan 1973: 556)
Ugh. Harold Bloom - he wrote... vividly. What did he write? Something about the classics? Sure. About them. Vividly. We don't know what, or if any of it is even relevant for this discussion, just that he did.
As in the beginning, so in the end; as above, so below. Such are the principles of mythical thought. Yet myth appears mainly retrograde, its focus on some event in the immemorial past, in illo tempore (Eliade). Into that far, dim, and sacred time, a privileged state of existence is usually projected. Is that state one of universal consciousness? (Hassan 1973: 556)
I recall the bare-bones lotmanian definition of myth: a story that could or could not be true. This is something else. But if it is projected into the immemorial past then what would we make of Stapledon's conscious myth-making, which is expressly oriented towards the future? In illo tempore - sub specie aeternitatis?
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.Just what was that unitary language of mankind before God struck it into a babel of tongues? Music? Mathematics? Telepathy? Chomsky's deep structures of the mind or linguistic universals ringing each to each? (Hassan 1973: 557)
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. (all italics mine)
I've already got a title. This one is good but... probably to be met with elsewhere.
According to Erich Neumann, the ancient plorematic or uroboric condition of existence is less conscious than unconscious, a state ruled by the Great Mother, a state, therefore, of participation mystique. Gnosticism, however, insists on spiritualizing this condition. "Consequently, in Gnosticism," Neumann says, "the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side; whereas uroboric salvation through the Great Mother demands the abandonment of the conscious principle and a homecoming to the unconscious" (The Origins and History of Consciousness). (Hassan 1973: 557)
Hopefully I'm not going to step into this one. I still recall what a (w)hole it was - after meeting the word used by a sequence of semioticians - discovering pleroma. This "pleromatic" sounds akin - a totalic totalism. (Which is another way of saying: I'm not even going to google this just for the sake of my mental health.)
Yet if Beginnings and Ends are cognate, they must express, on some concealed level at least, a point of contact, perhaps even of identity. In the Jewish Midrash, for instance, the unborn babe in its womb carries a prophetic light around its head in which it sees the end of the world. (Recall, again, the eschatological image of the luminous intergalactic foetus at the end of "2001.") Furthermore, the mystic trance and shamanistic journey are both ways of recovering the First and Last moment into the present. (Hassan 1973: 557)
Eschatology on par with that of
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries:In India a whole literature has been devoted to explanations of this paradoxical relationship between what is pre-eminently unconscious - Matter - and pure "consciousness," the Spirit, which by its own mode of being is atemporal, free, uninvolved in the becoming. And one of the most unexpected results of this philosophic labor has been its conclusion that the Unconscious (i.e. pakriti), moving by a kind of 'teleological instinct,' imitates the behaviour of the Spirit; that the Unconscious behaves in such a way that its activity seems to prefigure the mode of being of the Spirit.I doubt that such questions can be answered at this time in any terms that would satisfy those who insist on an answer; yet they are the very questions that myth raises repeatedly before the skeptical mind. Behind these questions lurks a desire, an intuition, perhaps even a gnosis, of a universal consciousness that transcends time, and transcends the organization of our most complex language. (Hassan 1973: 558)
Spinoza's Substance, again? What I take issue with is that desire, intuition, and gnosis follow no system that I'm aware of. This is not triadic! It could be, at a stretch, if intuition was placed first - but then I'm not sure any more that it should go first. (Do we experience the world "intuitively"? How so? Do we grasp it logically based on self-evident and self-sufficient axioms, etc.? | Damn I hate the concept of intuition. Why won't it stay still not even for a moment?)
We all acknowledge that science and its extension in technology are the major agents of transformation in our world. Sometmies we acknowledge it fearfully, and like Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society, we see only dark portends of our future. "Enclosed within his artificial creation," Ellul writes, "man finds that there is 'no exit;' that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years." (Hassan 1973: 558)
I absolutely hate this. I've been reading Tomberg's Kuidas täita soovi and it deals with exactly this issue in the first chapter: this mythical "outside nature" (what biosemioticians would call 0-nature) no longer exists. Man cannot get away from the city - he goes to the forest with a smartphone in his pocket. He does not forget the clock. He can tell the time, and consequently does not see the forest for the trees, whose time-span is decades instead of his mere minutes.
Consider that familiar rubric, "the communication explosion." Quite precisely, a layer of sentience or awareness now envelops the earth, much like Teilhard's "noösphere," moving everThe communication explosion is a product not only of technology but also of the population explosion. There are, literally, more brains on earth, working all at the same time. How does this fact affect the degree of sentience on earth?(Hassan 1973: 558-59)
I'm all out of "a titles" for now. (I guess?) The major takeaway here is that Lotman's Culture and Explosion could have derived the latter from Teilhard just the same.
Furthermore, communication itself is becoming increasingly immediate, requiring less and less mediation. It is a far cry from a stone hieroglyph weighing five tons, to a wireless set weighing less than a pound. Even now we casually use "slow motion telepathy," as Barry Schwartz puts it, devices that require only microseconds to elapse between coded communication, decoded message, and feedback [Arts in Society (Summer-Fall, 1972)]. The process can be extended by radio or laser far into the universe. There are also other means. (Hassan 1973: 559)
We've long ago achieved instantineity and it was no biggie. The heaviest smartphone (that I have held in my human hands) weighs 5.93 oz so 1/3 of a pound (burger measures are weird).
The process is itself part of what Buckminster Fuller calls "ephemeralization:" doing constantly more with constantly less. As a result, matter intervenes less and less in the transactions of mankind. And mind is free to pursue its destiny: to become the antientropic, or synoptic, force in the universe, gathering knowledge, expanding consciousness, regenerating metaphysically a physically decaying universe. (Hassan 1973: 560)
Define:antientropic: showing a tendency towards order.
Fuller says in Utopia or Oblivion; to which he adds his great, optimistic principle: "Energy cannot decrease. Knowhow can only increase." In this ambience of sentience, telepathy becomes a new possibility. Thus Fuller again: "I think that possibly within ten years we'll discover scientifically that what has been telepathy and has been thought of as very mysterious is, in fact, ultra, ultra, high frequency electromagnetic wave propagation" (House and Garden, May, 1972). (Hassan 1973: 560)
100% Stapledonian.
In 1964 Marshall McLuhan stated in his book, Understanding Media:Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciosuness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever.(Hassan 1973: 560)
Yeah, pretty much confirmed that McLuhan didn't understand computers at all.
And here is the point: some of the finest science fiction concerns itself, like its two parents, Myth and Technology, with the question of a universal consciousness. Sometimes the assumption appears to be that wherever life obtains in heightened forms, intelligence also functions in im-mediate ways. At other times, the assumption is simply that human minds are good enough to imagine better minds with, but good for little more. (Hassan 1973: 566)
So well put. I would relate it to Stapledon's tendency not only to develop new human species but the never-ending (though factually ending) attempt to create increasingly more developed minds; the last of the last men are intentionally more developed than their parents.
British science fiction has richly rendered its own version of this theme (see Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud or Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men). (Hassan 1973: 566)
"The Black Cloud is a 1957 science fiction novel by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. It details the arrival of an enormous cloud of gas that enters the Solar System and appears about to destroy most of the life on Earth by blocking the Sun's radiation."
These three science fictions are by no means unique in presaging the transformation of man into a vast noetic reality, a universal consciousness capable of im-mediate exchanges of knowledge. Can such anticipatory myths become slow, self-fulfilling prophecies? Or is the future simply our most widely shared, treasured, and revised fantasy? (Hassan 1973: 567)
Cut it out. Stop it.
The New Gnosticism is the result of various synergies. Myth and Technology, for instance, now easily blend in the mind. A great part of our culture, however, still abets opposition, division. Consider, for instance, the current distinction between Arcadians and Technophiles:These, to be sure, are stereotypes. Yet their tensions inform such serious works as Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, and Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine - note the titles - works that prefigure some of our postmodern perplexities. (Hassan 1973: 550)
The Arcadians look for the unspoiled life in nature. They tend to be mythically minded and edenic. Hostile to technology, they like communes, ecology, health foods, folk music, occult and visionary literature. They are children of the Earth, mother-oriented, ruled by the great archetypes. See Charles Reich's The Greening of America, Theodore Roszak's Where the Wasteland Ends, or George B. Leonard's The Transformation. The Technophiles favor the active life of cities. They tend to be technically minded and utopian. They like gadgets, science fiction, electronic music, space programs, futuristic designs of their environment. They are children of the Sky, father-oriented, struggling to create neotypes. See Zbigniew Brzezinsky's Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, F. M. Esfandiary's Optimism One: The Emerging Radicalism, or Victor Ferkiss' Technological Man.
- Reich, Charles A. 1972. The Greening of America. New York; Toronto: Bantam Books. [Internet Archive]
- Roszak, Theodore 1972. Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society. New York: Doubleday. [Internet Archive]
- Leonard, George B. 1981[1972]. The Transformation: A Guide to the Inevitable Changes in Humankind. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher. [Internet Archive]
- Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. 1970. Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era. New York: Viking Press. [Internet Archive]
- Esfandiary, F. M. 1970. Optimism One: The Emerging Radicalism. New York: Norton. [Internet Archive]
- Ferkiss, Victor C. 1969. Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality. New York: George Braziller. [Internet Archive]
- Marx, Leo 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. [Internet Archive]
- Koestler, Arthur 1982[1967]. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Random House. [Internet Archive]
- Mumford, Lewis 1967. The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. [Internet Archive]
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