To: nettime-l Subject: Re: nettime: Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference - Erik Davis From: t byfield Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 02:13:28 -0500
At 11:02 PM -0500 on 9/24/96, Erik Davis wrote:
I realize that Nettime owes much of its coherence to the lack of interminable back-and-forth nitpicking or the even more horrible flame wars, but I must respond to some of ted’s comments.
Likewise; the one thing I’ve found most lacking about nettime is the lack of back and forth (maybe I’m not alone?), so I hope the list subscribers will indulge me.
False my friend. Basilides, Marcion, and Valentinus are real historical figures, living and working in Alexandria, and they had real working groups. If they werent gnostics, no-one was [see The Tree of Gnosis by Ioan Couliano, student of Eliade and one of the great scholars of Gnosticism before he was (probably) bumped off by Romanian secret police]. The very Hellenistic Plotinus would not have written “against the gnostics” if there had been no gnostics around. Ted also makes the strange assumption — which he would describe as “extremely dubious” — that Gnosticism has little to do with “platonizing Christians,” when much of Gnosticism can be defined as a radical Neoplatonic interpretation of certain Christian ideas. This of course begs the larger question of what constitutes a gnostic, which is such a cantankerous debate that the headiest scholars can barely come up with handy working definitions. For the purposes of my essay, I choose not to enter into that briar patch, but to ride with the ideas. And in the case of the demiurge, the material we have clearly indicates differing ways of interpreting his motivations, with varying degrees of dualism.
Shall we assume that the US was crawling with “commie pinko spies and saboteurs” ca. 1952 because Joe McCarthy made a career out of finding them under every rock and damning them to hell and back? Or that thousands of heretics swam from Spain to Sardinia and infected the masses with satanic beliefs in the later middle ages because a heresiological text claims that they did? Heresioligists and polemicists — like Plotinus — are infamously unreliable sources for the existence, practices, and beliefs of the (alleged) groups they harangue.
My reading has led me to conclude that there were “real” gnostic groups, or at least groups of folks who incorporated what we consider gnostic material into their trip. But thats really beside the point. I am not a Near Eastern scholar, but an essayist, and am compelled by ideas and images. The texts are there, and even if they were written by 2nd century kooks or science fiction writers (wild-eyed Philip K Dicks), the ideas and imagery of gnosticism entered the history of religious thought. There are overwhelmingly clear structural parallels between the Nag Hammadi material and later groups like the Manicheaens and the Mandeans (50,000 of whom still live today in Iran). Ted seems hung up on the notion that for any reference to the Hellenistic gnosisticsm must proceed by historical proof of the existence of “hegemonic” groups. The real weight of gnosticism is intellectual and mythic. For me it is sufficient that these ideas were out there, that they resonated then and that they resonate — at least for the more half-baked among us — now.
You’re absolutely right that gnosticizing tendencies — dualism, elaborate cosmologies, variously rigid or dialectical theodicies — played (and may continue to play) a huge part in the elaboration of “Western” religions, ethics, moralities, and notions of societies. For the rest, I spoke of hegemonic structures, not groups, and by structures I mean pervasive ideologies, which can be as historically distinct or continuous as anyone chooses to see them; I prefer specifics and ruptures, but that’s just my taste.
So what? If by “rhetoric” you mean that I am playing with ideas and language to suggest certain imaginative connections and alternative ways of looking at technoculture, I stand accused. What do you believe the purpose of thinking and writing are? Besides, as my essay shows, Dick certainly made these connections — in his “non-fiction” writings moreoever, writings which, like mine, attempt to grapple with contemporary issues that nobody understands by looking through the cracked glasses of the religious imagination.
Claims like “the demiurge is alive and well and living in technoculture” seem to me to draw more force from a slippery reductionism — heavy with moral baggage — than from a descriptive analysis that might lay the basis for an ethical response. That’s not a blanket denunciation of poetics — far from it.
“radically different in every way,” “false master narrative,” “utterly false.” “extremely dubious” — you must be a rationalist, because you love absolutes! I would point out that my piece implied no such grandiose argument about the progressive history of representation — even my own rhetorical cues like the deliberately folksy “alive and well” indicate that I am playing with certain notions, not speaking in the hard and bitter language you favor. And if you deny that part of the pleasure and selling power of virtual reality does not derive from the sense of entering another world, well you’ve never played Battletech or been addicted to a MUD.
You may not have intended a grandiose historical narrative, but I found one; so I’ll reread your essay, and you should too. For the rest, “virtual reality” is a very vague name with which to lump together MUDS and shoot-em-up games. Most of the MUDs I’ve mucked around with have been torn part by explicitly social debates and questions of consensus; Donkey Kong Country involves no such dynamic. They have little in common beyond the fact of computational horsepower.
FYI, your final comments about “God games” and their connection to military strategy games had very little to do with my article. If anything, they support the notion that the demiurgic mode of technoculture is, as Dick implied, rather bad news. Besides, I am genuinely surprised that you think the transition of strategy games to digital space and proto- A-Life environments is really so trivial, or that the relatively complex dynamics of SimEarth (which does not involve killing off opponents) is just a hopped up game of Battleship.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time meditating on “complex dymanics,” in a vague way for about a decade and very explicitly since I spent a long summer editing De Landa’s book, and in sum, no, I don’t think “complexity” remotely as important as people are making out; if it’s always been there, it won’t go away anytime soon, so I’d rather see effort expended on much more basic questions — whether someone was trained to be a militarist by Battleship or Battletech seems mostly immaterial.
I’d be happy — and curious — to chat about it off nettime.
Anyway, cheers.
Ted