techgnosis

i, fukky, sat down with sadoo natcanej in a cardboard box on the banks of the east river a few days ago. i had invited myself for dandelion root coffee and nettle soup numerous times over the years but the sadoo had always been too busy. i’m singing, it shouts. i’m reciting the genealogies of clouds. i’m floating on streams of dark visions. i’m staring into space waiting for shapes to crawl from their shapeless homes. if i had known sadoo natcanej less well, i would have thought it didn’t want to see me but i knew it loved me and could only continue loving me if it could continue being itself.

sadoo natcanej is the busiest person i know. people think presidents and deans and rock stars are busy because their external agendas are full, their calendars crammed. this is not untrue. but sadoo natcanej – who has no obligations in the socioeconomic world … its days, while an agenda is never obviously formed or required, are never empty, for even emptiness is a task.

i was in luck this past wednesday, however, when i hollered from a safe distance – it’s i, fukky!

fukky! i’ve got fresh dandelion root coffee brewing and a new batch of nettle soup on the go.

sadoo natcanej wasn’t one to talk about the news or any pains he or i had, the spider problems in his home, so i got right down to business. sadoo natcanej, i realize you don’t particularly care about the common names mainstream society might throw around, but as someone society might consider a hermit and eccentric, why do you live in manhattan, on the east’s edge, rather than, say, like thoreau, in a cabin in the woods?

why is one of those common words mainstream society throws around.

well can you at least talk about your experience being a recluse and madman in manhattan? and have you ever lived in the woods?

i’ve lived in the manhattan of the woods and now i live in the woods of manhattan. i have a great deal of respect for thoreau, frost – these pioneers of early sadooity. but those times were different. and people forget thoreau only did walden for a couple of years and wasn’t far from concord. frost was married, though not necessarily happily, and while ostensibly a nature poet certainly mingled with the people. as has been well pointed out by poets and philosophers over the past century, nature doesn’t effectively exist anymore – at least not in the way it used to.

what do you mean by this – nature obviously still exists?

nature is now simulated. all this has been well discussed. you know the texts. this simulation forms the molecular structure of the gaps between utopia and dystopia, creation and apocalypse – gaps i might add are ones that our flesh is now made of.

an aspect of what has been termed techgnosis?

right, but most are approaching techgnosis from the tech side. great. i’m interested though in approaching it from the gnosis side – what has classically been called mysticism. not an entirely fair separation i know, this tech and gnosis, but one i temporarily need to explore certain practices and ideas. 

the links between mysticism and religion are too complex to explore right now, other than to say mysticism has typically had a strained and even antithetical relationship with institutional religion – this is hardly surprising considering the latter emphasizes external structure and hierarchies and the former emphasizes interiority and the dissolution of hierarchy in light of the overwhelming present of an energy or energies that have been called god, the godhead, dao, emptiness, the totality of the universe … many other things … the name, as mystics perhaps know best and as the opening to the dao de jing well articulates, isn’t particularly important. in technology – just another form of institutional religion: often missed because of our easy confusion of name and spirit – the situation is no different; mysticism still strains. and i use the verb in its polysemous sense.

so i require the city – its garbage, noise, dirt, confusion, chaos, humanity and associated hubris, wealth and poverty, strivings – let’s call the city technology and the city in time techgnosis … but, being still in flesh – and humanity is as far as i can tell some time removed from being out of flesh – i am nature and i in time am also fleshgnosis. i require the city as environment, as counterpoint and fulfillment of my flesh.

mysticism – as many would have it … is not primarily a discipline of feeling. there are of course what might be considered the hysteric mystics, the erotic mystics, etc., and these have their validity, but many mystics – from eckhart to weil – are more rational than many scholars. i think even schrodinger in his essay what is life? more or less labels himself a thinker and mystics feelers – ironic since in that essay he assumes mystical attributes, adumbrating the discovery of dna structure. mysticism at its best i think unites reason, feeling, flesh, intuition – a kind of fleshtechgnosis before fleshtechgnosis. that is, mysticism is most simply knowing nature through one’s body and so today knowing also technology through technology.

technology electrifies flesh – this articulated thought is at least as old as mcluhan – and so humanity transfers its wars and scrimmages from the plane of nature to the plane of planes so to speak – that is, technology. and so our flesh becomes the plane and the plane our flesh. obvious visible signs are certain present emphases on sex, relationship, health and wellness, physiological mutations, spiritual hallucinogens, etc. this is fine, but human flesh may not be able to take the whole burden of nature ... or rather technology as prosthetic may not be able to maintain an adequate pace of the increasing burden.

i have spent time in what is called the country, the woods – and even now a colleague occasionally lends me its metallic mule so that i can dip into the forests for a time – peace is only possible there for cottagers, who use it as a cloister away from nature; they use it as a technology in nature to briefly escape the nature in technology. when i’m in the woods – darkness, solitude, bears, bugs – there is little peace, repose. i bring the electricity of the city with me, in my neurological structures. i live on the knife edge of light. urban war is in my synaptic fires. i feel the tension between the hunger of my technological flesh and the hunger of the darkness, bears and bugs, the starvation of solitude. this is all good for a time. but to make it my home? i don’t want to discount those who retreat there permanently but i do find that a kind of romanticism unsupported by time.

yet you retreat from the scrimmage of society?

do i? there are many ways to engage and the adapted and adapting path i'm on is a neglected one that comes with some robust and tested recommendations. i felt called when i was young to a lifelong pursuit of the vanaprastha phase in hinduism’s ashrama cycle. i’ve never believed in enlightenment, healing, moksha, liberation – the fourth and final stage of ashrama, sanyasa. the first and second stages (brahmacharya – student and grihastha – worker, householder) are what almost everyone devotes their whole lives to. fine. but i look for diversity of expression and lifestyle, i seek a thriving psychic and spiritual rainforest. vanaprastha in sanskrit means retiring into a forest. but for me the forest in the third millennium is the city and retiring doesn’t mean disengaging – i could argue that by living with few intermediaries between my body and the city, with few mercantile or (what are often called) productive distractions, i absorb more (or at least as much as, though differently) of the mechanical forest than one who works on the 42^nd floor of the chrysler building or teaches cultural studies at nyu and lives in a 10,000 square foot home in new canaan.

you referred earlier to the gaps between utopia and dystopia. can you speak more of these?

confusing one’s own condition and the human condition, and the human condition and the earth’s condition, and the earth’s condition with the universe’s condition, is intolerably sloppy. it leads to facile conclusions that because my life is bad, life is bad … or even, to move from the egocentric to anthropocentric … because humanity is bad or even doomed life is bad. life doesn’t care about us. that’s a beautiful thought. it’s only despairing from certain angles. i naturally accept these angles as true, but insufficient, even as i accept all thoughts and feelings as true but insufficient. hope, despair – these don’t and shouldn't disappear but do become lovers, dance partners, acquaintances if not friends, as we untie the knots of these confusions. and once we see this, it’s not hard to likewise begin experiencing many of our problems arising from a puerile need for life to care about us. and from attempting to force life – and in life i include humans – to care about us. i’m not classically religious but philosophical daoism has many good tips for accepting life, not confusing self and humanity or humanity and world, and craftily subverting hope and despair, antitheses between life and death. but ironically perhaps this subversion means accepting hope and despair, as they’re just aspects of life.

there are all these oppositions that aren’t simply the result of constructions called mental illness or sociopathy or enculturation or whatever. we say we are free, human nature is ours to define – then label pejoratively those who define their natures outside of established or being-established boundaries. sure, these boundaries shift. in certain environments – primarily core urban – one isn’t now stigmatized as a member of the lgbt community. this is obviously a good thing. but stigmatization has the curious habit of migrating from emerging areas to nascent experimental territories. conformism and inquisitional techniques – even if these have shifted from physical torture and murder to emotional and fiscal exiling – seem to me to be as alive as always.

i can sense you’ve got another meeting coming up so just one last question if i may.

there is much more to speak of – anonymity and its cousins as strategic tools, daoist perspectives on the relation of life and death in relation to innovation, education as destroyer rather than enhancer of privilege, … but, yes, i feel a vision coming on, so, certainly, one more question then hopefully we can talk again soon.

and by soon i knew it likely meant 5 or 10 years. how do sadoos fit into all of this?

technology attunes our flesh. our bodies become antennae, sensors. the resultant sensitivities birth manifestations that we call mental illness, electromagnetic hypersensitivity (regardless of any imagined or authentic causes), anomie, acedia, depression and anxiety, aboulia, and so on. rather than see these as sicknesses – and especially sicknesses that are only the challenges of the ‘sick’ rather than products of society and time, co-productions of the individual and society, the many in the one and the one in the many – i see them as opportunities, as aesthetic gifts. i give myself over to these things others call sicknesses, diseases, maelstroms. i give my body – nature – full permission to be an antenna. and i find being an antenna a full-time job. sadoo for me means this then: devoting myself to being what i find myself i am, this body is in this city in time – a radiating quivering sensor of all things. a techgnosis node? yes. but also a fleshgnosis node. a fleshtech or techfleshgnosis.

again, and as i think i’ve already said, i could say i enter this more from the gnosis or mystic side of things. but the mystic knows all sides work strangely in concert, despite seemingly sometimes radical opposition. these knowledges and practices – lived, felt, sensed, articulated or not, expressed, are what for me is a sadoo.

and the practice of devoting one’s bodytech to gnosis – the mystical practice – in an apparently irreligious but truly techreligious age – of living as a sensor of god (to combine what perhaps is new and old language, though perhaps not:  we have always been sensors of god  and might always be, our software versions only changing) – is not well facilitated by the society i was born into. it’s partly the physical climate. new york isn’t india. but it’s partly the religious formations of technocapitalism – which aren’t separate of course from the climate – which view those lacking external agendas and capital as weak, selfish, lazy, useless bums.

i view us as sadoos. we do not have an institution and don’t want one. we think flying around the world in planes to lecture against global warming is ridiculous. we assume in our flesh the fragmentations and unities of technology. we oppose technocapitalism in its present rabid forms, in part because of the tyrannical bifurcations i just alluded to, in part because technology and nature need to be in symbiosis rather than abutted in hierarchical abstraction, in part because money as a force has become too forceful, in part because democratic governmental and political systems aren’t democratic. we don’t oppose technology. we are technology. just as we once were god. but are we so fatefully this kind of technology, that kind of god? these questions might be sadoo.

thanks sadoo natcanej, it’s been a blast.

some nettles for the road?

oh no, i’m good.