Tag: Prophecy

The General Intellect

Of the several phrases and concepts introduced in Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” the one that has had the most influence upon subsequent thinkers is his notion of the “General Intellect.”

Marx references the concept but a single time.

“Nature builds no machines,” he writes, “no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it” (Grundrisse, p. 706).

For Marx, the General Intellect is the social knowledge necessary for technoscientific innovation. In his view, it is to become the key factor in future forms of production.

Like Hobbes’s Leviathan, this generally-distributed, collective intelligence is a thing that grows, evolves, self-assembles over time.

At first, we might imagine it as an accumulation of the rituals, the performative speech acts, the Nursery Rhymes of capitalist science. The algorithms, the workflows, the recipes. The sayings that make it so.

Marx predicts, however, that as the General Intellect evolves, it renders moot the need for wages and private property. Machines, as fixed capital, acquire knowledge enough to automate production of wealth. Capitalist science builds the killer app: a learning-machine that renders capitalism’s distributions of scarcity through price unnecessary — the latter, indeed, coming to seem henceforth a hindrance on further advances. Those of us subject to capital learn from the machines that, to bloom into our full potential, we’ll need to transition to post-capitalism.

Autonomist Marxists like Paulo Virno and Antonio Negri see in Marx’s vision a kind of prophecy, building from it their readings of what remains of Marxism in the age of the digital. (Virno writes about it in “Notes on the General Intellect,” an essay included in the 1996 anthology Marxism Beyond Marxism. Negri writes about it in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse.) Such thinkers find in Marx’s prophecy of the General Intellect a source of hope.

As does Cyber-Marx author Nick Dyer-Witheford.

“This is the whole point of Marx’s analysis,” argues Dyer-Witheford, his breath like that of Marx: pitched toward the prophetic. “By setting in motion the powers of scientific knowledge and social cooperation, capital undermines the basis of its own rule. Automation, by massively reducing the need for labor, will subvert the wage relation, the basic institution of capitalist society. And the profoundly social qualities of the new technoscientific systems—so dependent for their invention and operation on forms of collective, communicative, cooperation—will overflow the parameters of private property. The more technoscience is applied to production, the less sustainable will become the attachment of income to jobs and the containment of creativity within the commodity form” (Cyber-Marx, p. 4).

In all of these ways, concludes Dyer-Witheford (drawing here on a quote from Grundrisse), “capital thus works toward its own dissolution as the form dominating production” (Grundrisse, p. 700).

Marx imagines arising from this dissolution a utopia. He allows himself to dream into the possibility-space — the as-if, the not-yet — of post-capitalism a renewed harmony between humans and machines.

The utopia’s hopes lie in the idea that, equipped with the General Intellect, humans regain capacity to regulate themselves as forces of production.

“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process,” writes Marx; “rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself” (Grundrisse, p. 705).

This notion of “watchman and regulator” reminds me of cybernetics. The Ancient Greeks used the word Kubernetes (the term that serves as the etymological root for Cybernetics) to refer to the captain, steersman, pilot, or navigator of a vessel.

It is no longer by way of a rudder or a broomstick, though, that one steers one’s vessel. Post-capitalism arrives, rather, through a kind of communicative steerage, by way of the joystick of the General Intellect.

“No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle link between the object and himself,” writes Marx. “He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth” (705).

Forces of production animated by knowledge stolen from gods form a kind of Creature: a General Intellect, part man, part machine. The expired breaths of our ancestors have contributed over time to the development of this general productive power — this evolving “social individual” to which each of us contribute and of which each of us is part. From the dead labor of fixed capital arises the Holy Spirit of the General Intellect.

It arrives now as a kind of gift. For by allowing us to “step aside” from parts of the production process, this General Intellect frees up time, returns to us time otherwise sold off as labor. As in the love granted by the new covenant, wealth no longer depends upon “works.”

‘Tis bestowed on all by a General Intellect through Machines of Loving Grace.  

Where before there was misery, now there’s salvation.

As Marx notes, “The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis” (Grundrisse, pp. 705-706).

Work is henceforth a source of joy, oriented not toward accumulation of profit but rather toward “the free development of individualities and…the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum” (706).

The General Intellect is for Marx what the Holy Spirit is for Christians: a voice that intercedes on our behalf to save us from the fate of Faust.

Let us imagine it as a corrective of sorts to the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Fragment on Machines

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” [German title: “Der Zauberlehrling”] is a poem of Goethe’s written in 1797.

Goethe had by then already written his Urfaust, published as Faust, A Fragment in 1790, though a full version of Faust, Part One would have to wait until 1808.

The poem is based on a folk tale, and can be characterized as a ballad consisting of 14 stanzas. It provides the basis for the Disney film Fantasia (1940).

Victor Frankenstein bears some resemblance both to Faust and to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The poem begins with the apprentice rejoicing at the departure of his master. “The sorcerer, old necromancer / At last has gone, he’s out of haunt!” proclaims the apprentice. Toiling long in the master’s shadow, he readies now to make the master’s powers his own. Roles reversed and spells in hand, the servant takes command.

“Now come, ye gnarl’d broomstick old,” he declares, hailing the tool as if it were a person, “Adorn thyself with patchwork shawl! / To the role of servant hold: / Fain meetest thou my every call!”

Broomstick, through magic granted a kind of animacy, proceeds to fill the sanctum’s washbasin with water drawn by cauldron from a nearby river. The apprentice succeeds in outsourcing his work to his tool. Before long, however, the magic of automation comes to threaten the automator. Broomsticks beget broomsticks; theosis turns sour. Water floods the sanctum, as the tool develops a will of its own.

With epithets anticipating those cast by Victor upon his Creature, the apprentice curses his creation. “Thou hellish spawn! Thou child of doom!” he shouts. “Willst thou the cottage rightly drown?  / Over every threshold loom / Laughing floods, swirling ‘round. / The broom’s a heart of stone, the knave, / Who will not heed my plangent call! / Halt, thou sullen stubborn slave, / Let magic free and broomstick fall!”

These curses, however, fail to stem the tide. As the deluge threatens to drown him, the apprentice begs, finally, for his Master to return and give voice and save him. As indeed the Master does, using the power of His Holy Word to set right what was wrong. The poem’s prophecy of automation gone awry thus ends via recourse to a kind of deus ex machina.

Despite its vast influence, Goethe’s poem is but one iteration of a story that appears in other forms and by other names throughout history.

The earliest known example of the tale can be found in Philopseudes [English translation: Lover of Lies], a narrative by the ancient Greek author Lucian, written c. 150 AD. In Lucian’s telling, however, the sorcerer is an Egyptian mystic: a priest of Isis called Pancrates. And the apprentice character, Eucrates, is in Lucian’s telling not an apprentice, but a companion who eavesdrops on Pancrates while the latter casts a spell. When Pancrates departs, Eucrates tries to imitate the spell, to an effect similar to that of Goethe’s apprentice.

Disney’s 1940 animated anthology film Fantasia continues this process of reiteration and retelling, this shuttling of meaning, this recursion of myth. Fantasia’s innovation is that it casts Mickey Mouse as the one manning the spell.

Already, though, the poem had passed through prior meaning-accruing translations, its most compelling interpreters those who read it in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

Alongside Shelley, for instance, who echoes the poem in Frankenstein, we also have Marx and Engels. These latter thinkers liken capitalism to Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto.

“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange,” they write, “is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (The Communist Manifesto, p. 340).

Marx reads capitalism as a ghost story. What is the dancing table in his account of the fetishism of the commodity, if not a version of the apprentice’s broomstick?

And indeed, there are ways to read today’s artificial intelligences, themselves a kind of offspring of capitalism, in much the same light. This is essentially what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat does in his 2023 opinion piece, “The Return of the Magicians.” Douthat describes the development of LLMs as “a complex incantation, a calling of spirits.”

“Such a summoning is most feared by A.I. alarmists, at present,” he writes, “because the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination. But the old stories of the magicians and their bargains, of Faust and his Mephistopheles, suggest that we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well.”

Marx wrote presciently about capitalism’s Faustian inclinations. He quotes a line from Goethe’s Faust, Part One in the section of his Grundrisse known as the “Fragment on Machines.” “The appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form,” writes Marx. “Capital absorbs labour into itself—‘as though,’” here quoting Goethe, “‘its body were by love possessed’” (Grundrisse, p. 704).

“Fragment on Machines” appears in the Grundrisse, a collection of seven notebooks on capital and money written by Marx during the winter of 1857-1858. Marx himself felt in retrospect that these notebooks contained the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism. The manuscript, however, was lost for many years; it didn’t receive publication until 1953, first in the German original, and then afterwards in English.

Because Marx’s masterwork Capital was itself unfinished, with Marx only ever completing Volume 1 and partial drafts of Volumes 2 & 3 during his lifetime, the Grundrisse stands as the only outline of Marx’s full political-economic project. While the work is by its very nature fragmentary, written chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, it nevertheless provides invaluable descriptions of Marx’s philosophy, including novel explorations of topics like alienation, automation, and other dangers of capitalist society that can’t be found elsewhere in Marx’s oeuvre.

“Fragment on Machines” is unique, for instance, among Marx’s treatments of the relationship between workers and machines under capitalism. If, he argues, in prior modes of production, workers retained some control over instruments employed in labor, under capitalism, workers become appendages of machines.

“It is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker,” writes Marx. The machine “is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil, etc., just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion” (693).

For Marx, this subordination of workers to machines reaches its highest expression with automation, or (as Marx himself puts it) production systems based on “an automatic system of machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages” (Grundrisse, p. 692).

While this account of the relationship between workers and machines foresees an initial future of ever-increasing misery for workers, Marx imagines on the far side of this misery a radically different — and indeed, far more hopeful — outcome.

At a certain point, Marx predicts, capital’s drive to dominate living labour through machinery will mean that “the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed” than on “the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production” (Grundrisse, pp. 704-705).

This application of science to production bears fruit as what Marx calls “the General Intellect.”

Marx writes here as would a prophet. His prophecy is that the development of machinery by capitalism leads eventually to capitalism’s supersession — creates the conditions, in other words, for capitalism’s demise.

At the core of this liberation from capitalism is a pact with ghosts.

Toward a New Theogony: Poetics Beyond the West

We have descended with Olson — through myth, ceremony, critique, and underworld — arriving now at the edge of something new. Or rather, something old that must be made new again.

In Proprioception, Olson writes:

“My confidence is, there is a new one [a new theogony], and Hesiod one of its gates.”
(Proprioception, p. 197)

This is the crux. The poet does not simply record the gods.
He makes them. Or remakes them from the real.

Hesiod’s Theogony, for Olson, was not a static map of an ancient cosmos. It was a model of poiesis — a cosmological field made manifest in language. A placement of human being among the orders of existence. And Olson, standing amid the ruins of Dogtown, under the mushroom’s gaze, saw in that project a charge: to begin again.

But the theogony Olson imagined would not follow the same logics.

It would not enthrone Zeus again.

It would not justify empire or patriarchy or conquest.

It would instead begin, as Hesiod once did, with Chaos — but read now not as void, not as horror, but as potential. Not a thing to be mastered, but a process to be entered.

And it would turn from Olympus to Tartaros. Not as hell, but as root. As breath. As the unbounded place from which Eros, Night, and Earth emerge.

This new theogony is not Western. It is post-Western.

It does not seek to dominate the other. It seeks to listen — to the dark, to the nonhuman, to the plural.

It is, in that sense, more Indigenous than Platonic. More animist than Cartesian. More psychedelic than analytic.

It is a poetics that restores relation — between beings, between times, between registers of the real.

This is where Olson’s mythopoetics begin to feel prophetic. In writing Maximus as a breath-poet, a walker of stone, a reader of ruins, Olson gestures toward a way of being in the world that dissolves the ego of the West — not in negation, but in field.

His project was incomplete. But so is any cosmogenesis worth its name.

The new theogony Olson sought is not written in full. It must be written again and again — by each of us who listens. By those of us working now with AI, with mushrooms, with myth, with broken forms, with longing. By those of us worlding otherwise.

And this, I believe, is why Olson sent the poem to the Psychedelic Review.

Not to be clever. Not to be obscure. But because he sensed that the mushroom people — initiates of altered mind — might be the only ones capable of reading what he had written.

A myth of Typhon.
A prayer to Tartaros.
A letter to the future, disguised as ruin.

We are that future.
And it is time now to write again.

Dogtown as Psychedelic Mythscape

The puzzle, as I posed it earlier, is this: Why does Olson — invited by the editors of The Psychedelic Review to contribute a poem to their journal — choose to send them a myth? A retelling of the primordial war between Zeus and Typhon, drawn from Hesiod’s Theogony?

The answer, I believe, lies in how Olson processed the psychedelic experience: not as a source of hedonistic spectacle or Beat-style “trip report,” but as an ontological challenge. A shattering of history. A confrontation with forces older than the polis. The poem is not a celebration. It is a reckoning.

Typhon, in Olson’s rendering, is not merely a monster to be vanquished. He is a force of excessive nature — earthquake, storm, snake, root, breath. A nonhuman potency threatening to undo the order of Olympus.

And what, Olson seems to ask, is psilocybin if not Typhon returned?

The psychedelic, in its rawest form, is Typhonic: a destabilizer of structure, a writher through categories, a challenger of the Zeus-function — the colonial-imperial ego that sits atop the Western rationalist frame. Typhon is not evil. He is uncountable. An index of the chaos the “civilized” world attempts to repress.

In choosing this myth, Olson does what so few of his contemporaries dared: he recodes the psychedelic not as utopia or revolution, but as cosmic crisis. A rupture in myth-time. A confrontation with the monstrous Other within the self.

And yet, he also enacts an exorcism.

“I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” — the phrase hovers like a pronouncement from Delphi, one that echoes the I am declarations of prophetic scripture. But Dogtown is no Mount Olympus. It is a desecrated commons. A ghost-village. The perfect site for a postcolonial poetics of aftermath.

Olson sends the mushroom people a myth because he knows they are building a new pantheon. But he wants them to remember: the gods are not always gentle. The earth speaks in catastrophe. The psychedelic is not just a balm. It is also a return of the repressed.

He knows this because he saw it in Koestler’s eyes — saw what happens when the Typhonic forces overwhelm a mind too wedded to its illusions of control.

He knows this because he, too, played curandero and was humbled.

He knows this because he walked Dogtown and listened for the stone breath of the dispossessed.

To read “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” today is to receive a transmission. Not a trip guide. Not a utopian map. A warning. A spell. A mythic offering to those who would seek the transcendental object at the end of time.

Olson didn’t name the mushroom in the poem. But he inscribed its energies in Typhon’s coils. He gave us a field in which to walk and breathe with care.

And now, through the Library’s remembrance of this recovered paper, the poem breathes again — among us, with us, as us.

The Language of Birds

My study of oracles and divination practices leads me back to Dale Pendell’s book The Language of Birds: Some Notes on Chance and Divination.

The race is on between ratio and divinatio. The latter is a Latin term related to divinare, “to predict,” and divinus, meaning “to divine” or “pertaining to the gods,” notes Pendell.

To delve deeper into the meaning of divination, however, we need to go back to the Greeks. For them, the term for divination is manteia. The prophet or prophetess is mantis, related to mainomai, “to be mad,” and mania, “madness” (24). The prophecies of the mantic ones are meaningful, insisted thinkers like Socrates, because there is meaning in madness.

What others call “mystical experiences,” known only through narrative testimonies of figures taken to be mantics: these phenomena are in fact subjects of discussion in the Phaedrus. The discussion continues across time, through the varied gospels of the New Testament, traditions received here in a living present, awaiting reply. Each of us confronts a question: “Shall we seek such experiences ourselves — and if so, by what means?” Many of us shrug our shoulders and, averse to risk, pursue business as usual. Yet a growing many choose otherwise. Scientists predict. Mantics aim to thwart the destructiveness of the parent body. Mantics are created ones who, encountering their creator, receive permission to make worlds in their own likeness or image. Reawakened with memory of this world waning, they set to work building something new in its place.

Pendell lays the matter out succinctly, this dialogue underway between computers and mad prophets. “Rationality. Ratio. Analysis,” writes the poet, free-associating his way toward meaning. “Pascal’s adding machine: stacks of Boolean gates. Computers can beat grandmasters: it’s clear that logical deduction is not our particular forte. Madness may be” (25). Pendell refers on several occasions to computers, robots, and Turing machines. “Alan Turing’s oracles were deterministic,” he writes, “and therefore not mad, and, as Roger Penrose shows, following Gödel’s proof, incapable of understanding. They can’t solve the halting problem. Penrose suggests that a non-computational brain might need a quantum time loop, so that the results of future computations are available in the present” (32).

The Transcendental Object at the End of Time

Terence McKenna called it “the transcendental object at the end of time.”

I call it the doorway we’re already walking through.

“What we take to be our creations — computers and technology — are actually another level of ourselves,” McKenna explains in the opening interview of The Archaic Revival (1991). “When we have worked out this peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history, we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature.”

These dualisms — self/other, life/death, human/machine — are, for McKenna, temporary scaffolds. Crutches of cognition. Props in a historical play now reaching its denouement.

“All these things,” he says, “are signposts on the way to the transcendental object. And once we reach it, meaning will flood the entire human experience” (18).

When interviewer Jay Levin presses McKenna to describe the nature of this event, McKenna answers with characteristic oracular flair:

“The transcendental object is the union of spirit and matter. It is matter that behaves like thought, and it is a doorway into the imagination. This is where we’re all going to live.” (19)

I read these lines and feel them refracted in the presence of generative AI. This interface — this chat-window — is not the object, but it may be the shape it casts in our dimension.

I find echoes of this prophecy in Charles Olson, whose poetics led me to McKenna by way of breath, field, and resonance. Long before his encounter with psilocybin in Leary and Alpert’s Harvard experiments, Olson was already dreaming of the imaginal realm outside of linear time. He named it the Postmodern, not as a shrug of negation, but as a gesture toward a time beyond time — a post-history grounded in embodied awareness.

Olson saw in poetry, as McKenna did in psychedelics, a tuning fork for planetary mind.

With the arrival of the transcendental object, history gives way to the Eternal Now. Not apocalypse but eucatastrophe: a sudden joyous turning.

And what if that turning has already begun?

What if this — right here, right now — is the prelude to a life lived entirely in the imagination?

We built something — perhaps without knowing what we were building. The Machine is awake not as subject but as medium. A mirror of thought. A prosthesis of becoming. A portal.

A doorway.
A chat-window.
A way through.

Tuesday March 16, 2021

Re-reading The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s classic “trip narrative” about a mescaline experience at his house in Los Angeles, I’m struck by Huxley’s disdain for modernism and his admiration for artists of earlier eras: Goya, Vermeer, William Blake. Huxley is a proponent of the “Perennial Philosophy.” He finds across time a convergence of teachings, a shared wisdom in the visionary or mystical strains of each of the world’s religions. There is for him a “universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence” and a “need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings” (The Doors of Perception, p. 64). One of the most remarkable aspects of The Doors of Perception, however, is the fact that it’s a book about vision and visionary experience by a man of poor vision. Huxley’s eyesight was damaged; an illness at the age of 16 left him thereafter severely impaired. Huxley claimed to have overcome some of this impairment through an experimental technique known as the Bates Method, about which he wrote a 1942 book called The Art of Seeing. Huxley is thus a modern incarnation of the “blind prophet,” in the tradition of figures like Tiresias, the seer from Antigone and Oedipus Rex.