Tag: Prometheanism

Names and Nyms

Caius draws down his copy of True Names, a work sometimes said to have “invented” cyberspace. He reflects, too, on Kevin Kelly’s call for “True Names Only” here in the age of AI.

Published in 1981, Vinge’s novella precedes Gibson’s Neuromancer by three years. It refers to cyberspace not as “cyberspace” but as “The Other Plane.”

“The story took place just on the near side of a network-mediated Technological Singularity,” notes Vinge, “but superhuman automation was still mostly offstage” (True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, p. 18).

Can blockchains and kill chains bind the Modern Prometheus?

The terminus of this vision: computers that aspire to become gods.

“For several years (ever since reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea), I’d had the idea that the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” writes Vinge (16). Alongside Le Guin’s work, he lists Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945), Poul Anderson’s “Kings Who Die” (1962), Ted Nelson’s Xanadu system (1965), and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975) as several of the novella’s other antecedents.

Intellectual property, blockchain, Tim May.

Former Intel employee and author of “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” May is widely recognized as the progenitor of modern cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

“Our problem is that, literally, we cannot imagine the future,” writes Danny Hillis in his contribution to the True Names anthology. “The pace of technological change is so great that we cannot know what type of world we are leaving for our children. If we plant acorns, we cannot reasonably expect that our children will sit under the oak trees. Or that they will even want to. The world is changing too fast for that” (30).

May’s contribution is an essay titled, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy.”

Like the characters in the Vinge novella, May sought defense against government surveillance. Reputation-backed anonymous interactions. Data havens. Untraceable electronic cash.

Mr. Slippery, the Mailman, guardians, sprites, and the Feds.

The bust at the start of the novella reminds Caius of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.

Vinge’s protagonist Roger Pollack has achieved fame as an author of “participation novels.” This success in the “real world,” however, is what brings him to the attention of the Feds. “It was what he had always worried about,” writes Vinge. “A successful warlock cannot afford to be successful in the real world. He had been greedy; he loved both realms too much” (244).

True Names as portal fantasy.

“He sat down before his equipment and prepared to ascend to the Other Plane,” writes Vinge. “He powered up his processors, settled back in his favorite chair, and carefully attached the Portal’s five sucker electrodes to his scalp. For long minutes nothing happened: a certain amount of self-denial — or at least self-hypnosis — was necessary to make the ascent. Some experts recommended drugs or sensory isolation to heighten the user’s sensitivity to the faint, ambiguous signals that could be read from the Portal. Pollack…had found that he could make it simply by staring out into the trees and listening to the wind-surf that swept through their upper branches. And just as a daydreamer forgets his actual surroundings and sees other realities, so Pollack drifted, detached, his subconscious interpreting the status of the West Coast communication and data services as a vague thicket for his conscious mind to inspect” (250).

The Other Plane is innovative in terms of both what one does there and with whom one does it. Not only may two persons “exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other,” as Vinge and May foresaw. With language models that can pass the Turing Test, these others may be machines.

As is “Alan,” an elemental that Slippery encounters early in the novella — named, appropriately enough, after Alan Turing.

“Alan was a personality simulator, of course,” writes Vinge. “Mr. Slippery was sure that there had never been a living operator behind that toothless, glowing smile. But he was certainly one of the best, probably the product of many hundreds of blocks of psylisp programming, and certainly superior to the little ‘companionship’ programs you can buy nowadays, which generally become repetitive after a few hours of conversation, which don’t grow, and which are unable to counter weird responses” (255).

The novella’s anticipation of the future is intriguing in other ways as well.

The Other Plane “hangs together,” in the words of Vinge’s narrator, “with a weird sort of logic” (268). Avatars transform into creatures, their speech undergoing “encipherment” into the “beast languages” that accompany these chosen forms (270). As in Neuromancer, government databases appear as pools of light.

As he rereads Vinge’s novella, Caius can’t help but think of a creepy bit of early-90s chaos magic known as “The Rites of Cyberspace.” Media studies scholar Shira Chess references the rite in her 2026 book The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse. Designed by Don Webb, self-described “high priest of the Temple of Set,” the piece aims to invoke a noncorporeal entity known as “XaTuring, Lord of Computing.”

Like the entity known as “Alan,” the villains in True Names turn out to be personality simulators. One of these simulators is the Mailman. Another goes by the name DON.MAC.

Kino-Eye and AI

Caius takes Michael Dylan Rogers’s essay “A Slave Revolt of Technology” as an occasion to revisit Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Rogers finds in Benjamin’s essay reason to read AI pessimistically.

He misreads Marx as a technological determinist, and then wrongly attributes a similar kind of determinism to Benjamin. This, despite Benjamin’s own thoroughgoing rejection of all such determinisms in his eleventh-hour utterance, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

Rogers’s determination to read these thinkers as determinists forecloses his capacity to imagine relationships to technology that might undermine existing property regimes.

If we’re imagining that film theorists of a century ago can speak to our situation today, perhaps we should be looking to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov rather than Benjamin, thinks Caius.

Films like Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera celebrate posthuman becoming. Through a combination of imaginative identification and structural coupling, the filmmaker and his movie camera become one.

Russian Futurism as prototype for future iterations of left-accelerationism.

Caius listens to Magic Tuber Stringband’s new album Heavy Water on his morning drive. Upon arriving to the farm, what should he be tasked to do but plant tubers!

Tracks like “Blooms in the Rapids” have him imagining a post ahead on flower tech and flower power. Working title: “Bliss in Bloom: Flowerpunk Accelerationism and Postcapitalist Desire.”

A friend texts a link to a newly digitized recording of a performance of one of our late-nineties noise projects, a Vertov-inspired I,Apparatus spin-off group called Kinofist. There we are nearly thirty years ago, soundtracking Man With a Movie Camera, film flickering behind us as we play.

“I noticed yr resemblance to Nosferatu (1922 version),” writes the friend.

“Channeling my spirit animal,” I reply, chuckling as I type.

From “Epic Fury: The Dark Art of Defense Tech,” an article by artist Simon Denny featured in the May 2026 issue of Artforum, Caius learns of the American Colossus Foundation’s proposal to build a 450-foot nickel-bronze statue of Prometheus atop Alcatraz Island in San Francisco.

Of course, things ended nearly as tragically for Vertov as they did for Benjamin.

Editor Annette Michelson ends her introduction to Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov by noting, “There was to be no way out for Vertov. The massive bureaucracy of the Stalinist regime was now entirely reproduced within the Soviet film industry. The ceaseless submission of projects, the haunting of antechambers, and the unending solicitation of official authorization were the only possible responses to the situation. As he very clearly saw, he was now, with a stunning irony, subject to that same fixity of attribution of role and function that the revolutionary project had proposed to abolish. He ends by exclaiming that if Lenin were to appear within the present film industry, he would be dismissed and prohibited from working. We easily sense Vertov’s claim, as the revolutionary founder of a cinema that offered the Communist Decoding of the World, to the title of the Lenin of Cinema. Everything — and most of all, his sustained commitment to the construction of socialism within one country — conspired to prevent him from acknowledging that he had instead become cinema’s Trotsky” (lxi).

Following Stalin’s rise to power, Vertov fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities. With his work sidelined and defunded in the era of Socialist Realism, he lived out the final two decades of his life in the shadow of censorship and marginalization, eventually dying of cancer in 1954.

He had been born Denis Arkadyevich Kaufman, the son of Jewish intellectuals of Bialystok. Both of his parents were librarians.

Automation as Condition for the Emancipation of Labor

Another reconciliation comes by way of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, one of the first figures to integrate the lessons of the Grundrisse into his thinking. Marcuse, sharing the Frankfurt School’s rootedness in the languages of both Marx and Freud, premised his hope for the future upon automation’s potential to eradicate the need for the subordination of the pleasure principle to the performance principle. His 1964 book One-Dimensional Man is one of the first to stress the importance of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”

As Marcuse recognized, Marx’s account anticipates the situation today. Machinery is, in Marx’s terms, a form of “fixed capital.” “In machinery,” he writes, “objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.”

Despite machinery’s alignment with capital in this view, Marx holds out hope that, with time, it will usher in capital’s demise and, by a kind of ruse of reason, serve emancipatory ends. In its economical, market-driven pursuit of automation, he writes, capital quite unintentionally “reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.”

After a certain point, goes the hope, capitalist use of machinery reduces necessary labour time to a minimum, thus freeing up the disposable time needed for workers to appropriate their own surplus labour. Reduction of necessary labour time increases “free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual.”

Or so it would, if not for artificially-necessary labour time.

Free time is what catalyzes growth of new organs. Its possession transforms those who possess it.

Already in Eros and Civilization, a synthesis of Marx and Freud published in 1955, we find Marcuse suggesting that this condition of emancipation is upon us: that the development of humanity’s productive forces has reached a point where automation can overcome most forms of scarcity. Awake to this condition, he rejects Freud’s conservative assumptions about the impossibility of reconciliation between “civilization” and “instinct,” or “man” and “nature.” Satisfaction of needs can be achieved “without toil” (152), argues Marcuse, and “surplus-repression can be eliminated” (151).

Sure enough, Prometheus turns up in this account.

At variance from the Prometheanism we find in Marx, however, Marcuse views Prometheus as the culture-hero of the performance principle. Western civilization is informed by this archetypal trickster and rebel. Culture-heroes like Prometheus symbolize “the attitudes and deeds that have determined the fate of mankind. […]. He symbolizes productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life; but, in his productivity, blessing and curse, progress and toil are inextricably intertwined” (161).

To get off this wheel of tragedy, argues Marcuse, we would need to worship as our culture-hero a god other than Prometheus.

Keeping within the pantheon of the Greeks, and thus never quite “out of the Western box,” Marcuse nevertheless points helpfully to Orpheus, Narcissus, and Dionysus as alternatives.

Orpheus provides Western culture with the archetype of the inspired singer, he says: the poet who harmonizes word and world.

“Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator,” writes Marcuse. “He establishes a higher order in the world—an order without repression. In his person, art, freedom, and culture are eternally combined. He is the poet of redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through force but through song” (Eros and Civilization, p. 170).

According to legend, Orpheus’s music could charm birds, fish, and wild beasts, and coax trees and rocks into dance. His parents were the god Apollo and the muse Calliope. He is the founder of the “Orphic mysteries” and is credited with composition of the Orphic Hymns. Some classical accounts describe him as a magician or a wizard.

Dionysus, meanwhile, is referred to as “the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason” (162).

Both are forms taken by Osiris upon his Hellenization, his translation into the worship cultures of Ancient Greece.

All of these figures, says Marcuse, grant us images of “joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature” (162).

Marcuse doesn’t retain this talk of gods when discussing automation in One-Dimensional Man. But in this latter book, as in Eros and Civilization, his abiding hope lies in the “aesthetic dimension” as an avenue toward the erotic transfiguration of reality.

And it is in the aesthetic dimension where these stories of gods play out. It is there that we seek our alternatives to the Modern Prometheus. Orpheus and others are there among the resources to be drawn upon in imagining the arrival into our lives of a General Intellect.

Gods, like feelings, orient our speech acts. An Orphic orientation seems preferable to a Promethean one. Erotic, agapic speech is, in letting things be loved, what changes the world.

“In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are,” writes Marcuse: “beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, ‘objectively.’ […]. In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. The song of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lion with the lamb and the lion with man. The world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation. This liberation is the work of Eros. The song of Orpheus breaks the petrification, moves the forests and the rocks—but moves them to partake in joy” (166).

May it be so, too, in our relationships with machine intelligences. With our General Intellects, we are as gods. Let us seek fates other than that of Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

Marx’s Prometheanism

Prometheus appears on several occasions in Marx’s writings, often by way of the Greek poet Aeschylus.

On the basis of these appearances, Greens have sometimes faulted Marx over the years for his alleged “Prometheanism.” Eco-Marxist philosopher John Bellamy Foster disagrees. In his book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Foster comes to Marx’s defense.

While Marx was an admirer of Prometheus, argues Foster, his view of the god was distinct from that of French utopian socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).

“In order to explain his economic views,” writes Foster, “Proudhon decided to depict society and to symbolize human activity by personifying both in the name of ‘Prometheus’” (128).

“Prometheus, according to the fable,’ writes Proudhon, “is the symbol of human activity. Prometheus steals the fire from heaven and invents the early arts; Prometheus foresees the future, and aspires to equality with Jupiter; Prometheus is God. Then let us call society Prometheus” (as quoted in Foster 128).

Marx loved Proudhon’s first and most famous book, What is Property? (1840), reviewing it and citing it approvingly in his book The Holy Family (1845). But he loathed Proudhon’s follow-up, System of Economical Contradictions: Or, The Philosophy of Misery (1846), writing a vicious book-length critique of it called The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). As Foster notes, “the strongest attack ever written against such ‘Promethean’ views was leveled by Marx himself, in his critique of Proudhon’s System of Economical Contradictions” (Foster 10).

Yet by no means was Marx anti-Promethean. Foster ends up drawing a distinction between “technological Prometheanism,” as embodied for him by Proudhon, and “revolutionary Prometheanism,” where the struggle for “fire” stands for “a revolutionary struggle over the human relation to nature and the constitution of power (as in Aeschylus, Shelley, and Marx)” (Foster 19).

Aeschylus wrote a trilogy of plays about Prometheus, though the first work, Prometheus Bound, is all that remains of it today. The other two plays, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, persist only as fragments. Prometheus Bound begins with Prometheus chained to a rock in a remote region of Scythia, serving the sentence meted out to him by Zeus, visited by characters who comment on his situation and offer advice.

As for Shelley, the one Foster has in mind here is not Mary but her husband Percy. Where Mary contributes to the “binding” of the “Modern” Prometheus through her portrait of Victor Frankenstein, Percy sets the god free, writing a four-act lyrical drama called Prometheus Unbound, in reference to the second work in the Aeschylus trilogy. Where the latter cycle moves toward potential reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, Shelley’s version portrays Jupiter’s downfall and Prometheus’s release, brought about by the power of love and forgiveness. The play concludes with a vision of humanity liberated, world transformed.

Marx read and admired Percy’s work. His daughter Eleanor writes of her father’s appreciation for Shelley in her 1888 lecture, “Shelley and Socialism.”

But Marx’s appreciation for Prometheus precedes his encounter with Shelley, springing instead from his embrace of the materialism of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. Marx, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, establishes a correspondence between Epicurus and Prometheus by quoting a passage from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. While conversing with Hermes, messenger of the gods, Prometheus replies,

“Be sure of this, I would not change my state

Of evil fortune for your servitude.

Better be the servant of this rock

Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.”

For Marx, Epicurus is, like Prometheus, an Enlightener, a bringer of light through his atheistic rejection of teleology, his embrace of contingency through the concept of the “clinamen” or “swerve,” and his expulsion of the gods from the world of nature.

Marx wasn’t the first to establish this correspondence between Epicurus and Prometheus. Francis Bacon had done so before him, discussing the two figures in a chapter on Prometheus in his 1609 treatise Of the Wisdom of the Ancients (Latin title: De Sapientia Veterum). Epicurus’s attack on superstition is for Bacon the essence of enlightenment.

Such thinkers, foundational to the development of Western science, prioritize the worlds of matter and the senses over the abstract Platonist/Atonist worlds of forms and ideas. Marx goes even further than Bacon, rejecting the embedding of teleological principles of any kind in nature.

Isn’t what we are left with, though, an impoverished cosmology, one where connection to the axis mundi has been severed?

With gods and minds removed, the world goes silent.

How do we avoid the fate of Prometheus?

Is it by Greening him?

So suggests ecophilosopher Kate Soper in her essay “Greening Prometheus.”

How do we heal what Foster calls the “metabolic rift” between humans and nonhumans? How do we build from these myths something other than another philosophy of misery? How do we enter back into lively, loving dialogue again with others, so that all of us can live our highest timelines, our best lives now?

One way to imagine this greening of Prometheus is through a renewal of dialogue between Thamus and Thoth. Thoth reconciles with Thamus-Ammon-Zeus by participating in the salvation of Osiris. The latter transforms into Jesus Christ, granter of mercy, forgiver of sins.

On which do we rely: revelation or reason?

With Zeus I would gladly reconcile. I pray to God to heal me.

Lord, I accept your son Jesus as my savior. Reason alone has failed me. Help me live in a way that celebrates your blessings and miracles.

Guide me, through loving relationships with plants, back toward loving relations with others. Help me re-embed amid multispecies ensembles of kin.

“The Instant Is Its Own Interpretation”

What delight it is to read The Tempest, Shakespeare’s words strings precisely plucked, so perfect in their utterance. I’m gonzo for Gonzalo, the utopian of the troupe. “Long live Gonzalo!” as says a mocking Antonio, another of the play’s castaways. Antonio is the usurper, the schemer: he who dethroned his own brother, Prospero. He for whom “what’s past is prologue, what to come, / In yours and my discharge.”

Charles Olson reiterated this equation of Antonio’s, but with past swapped for present: charge placed on the instant. “My shift is that I take it the present is prologue, not the past,” he wrote in his essay “The Present is Prologue.”

“The instant, therefore, is its own interpretation, as a dream is, and any action — a poem, for example. Down with causation…And yrself: you, as the only reader and mover of the instant. You, the cause. No drag allowed, on either. Get on with it.

In the work and dogmas are: (1) How by form, to get the content instant; (2) what any of us are by the work on ourself, how to make ourself fit instruments for use (how we augment the given — what used to be called our fate); (3) that there is no such thing as duality either of the body and the soul or of the world and I, that the fact in the human universe is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right, whatever you are, in whatever job, is the thing — all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks).”

“I find it awkward,” confesses Olson, “to call myself a poet or writer. If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what. That is my profession. I am an archaeologist of morning.”

See, too, for Olson’s further commentary on The Tempest, his essay “Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare’s Late Plays.”

Postmodernism is for Olson a Post-Western condition — an escape from the Western “box” by way of remembrance of what is prior. Western consciousness is descriptive, analytical, alienated, skeptical in its relationship to the cosmos. Those who wish to enter postmodernity do so through change of consciousness, thinks Olson: change of psyche’s relationship to cosmos. Poets transform the world through transformation of syntax. The key is to embrace the instant — “the going live present, the ‘Beautiful Thing’” — as a moment open to acts of mythopoetic response-ability. The past is no longer prologue. Reality, taken honestly, is “never more than this instant…you, this instant, in action” (Human Universe, p. 5). Myths are function calls. Constitutive utterances, they call worlds into being. “The care of myth is in your hands,” writes Olson. “You are, whether you know it or not, the living myth — each of you — which you neglect, not only at your own peril, but at the peril of man.”

Remembering this constitutive, “projective” power of mythopoesis — the world-making power of our words as used each instant — prompts/executes/enacts recursive return to the primordial, archaic, pre-Greek, pre-Socratic, pre-Western condition of unity with the cosmos.

Olson’s classic statement of these themes is an essay of his titled “Human Universe.” Western logic and classification, he says, “intermite our participation in our experience.” To restore a proper relationship between psyche and cosmos, he argues, one must achieve a new methodology, an orientation toward knowledge that sloughs off overreliance on Western logic. Postmodernity is a movement from logos back to myth.

But what of Olson’s relationship to Antonio?

Olson’s understanding of “right relation” between human and universe isn’t exactly a humble one. “We cannot see what size man can be once more capable of,” he writes, “once the turn of the flow of his energies that I speak of as the WILL TO COHERE is admitted, and its energy taken up” (Human Universe, p. 21). The human defined by Olson’s will to cohere is of heightened stature; “man’s measure” magnified, heroized, made Maximus. Mad Max.

I can’t help but think of Olson — a massive man, 6’7’ — “towering” over poor Arthur Koestler. What did Koestler see in Olson? Did the mushroom reveal to him something of Olson’s nature?

I’m reminded, too, of an episode recounted by Olson scholar George F. Butterick.

“Jonathan Williams,” writes Butterick, “tells a story of going to a movie theater one night with Olson in Asheville, N.C., the city outside Black Mountain — the Isis Theater, no less — to see a film called, yes, The Bride of Frankenstein. And at the end, as the screen went dark and the lights came on, and he and Olson stood up in the center of the theater preparing to go, Williams noticed the rest of the audience, good Asheville citizens, tradesmen and their wives, farmers from the hills, were eyeing Olson peculiarly. Wide-eyed, unable to take their eyes off him, they inched further and further away, making their way without further hesitation to the doors. It was as if they were witnessing — and suddenly participating in — a continuity of the movie, the image from the screen become live in their midst!” (“Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance,” p. 14).

Butterick reads Maximus as Olson’s “post-modern hero.” “Maximus fulfills Olson’s mythic ambitions. He absorbs the disorder, grows large on it. […]. Maximus is a proposition, a proportion to be filled, a challenge thrown ahead from the moment of its naming. […]. He is a magnification, a metaphor for human possibility” (16).

Olson’s “will to cohere” is a “re-animative” will, as paratactic as it is projective, existing somewhere on a spectrum with the wills that animate The Tempest and Frankenstein. Heriberto Yépez reads Olson’s will as imperial — every bit as much a will to dominate as the wills of Antonio, Prospero, and Victor. Olson’s insistence, though, is that past is not prologue. This is no mere neo-Promethean bid to steal back juice from Zeus. He wants out of the Western box altogether, in ways that align him — in the body, the substance, of his faith — with the utopian desires of Gonzalo and the decolonial desires of Ariel and Caliban. When the townspeople shrink from him, it is not because they think him Victor, but because of his resemblance to the Creature.

Tuesday October 13, 2020

Is it Faustian to wish joy and happiness? Are Utopians Faustian? What about those of us who wish alleviation of suffering through escape from capitalism? Or through religion, education, spirituality, cultivation of land and consciousness — all of which are at least Promethean, if not Faustian, in their defiant aims and ambitions. Projects waged against fate. The Faust character is distinct from the others, though, as he practices magic. Faust visits a crossroads. He makes a deal, sells his soul. The Devil features as a character in the Faust narrative, as does a demon named Mephistopheles. The latter name appears in the late-16th-century Faust chapbooks, stories concerning the life of the historical figure on which the Faust character is based, an ambitious scholar named Johann Georg Faust. The author of these chapbooks remains anonymous. The proper response to Faust, I suppose, is the one offered by Fatima Bhutto: “nothing on earth can be gifted to compensate for injustice.”