Over the past year, one of the books that has remained on my desk to be worked through in those elusive and fleeting ‘free moments’ of time when my 6-year-old is at school and I am not actively working (or passively just being a sloth) is Philosopher, Federico Campagna’s, masterwork “Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality” (T&M). After receiving the book I had difficulty committing my mental efforts to it because my desk time was then being spent fully immersed in the study of Sean Kelly’s “Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path Toward Wholeness” (1993). So when I did crack open Technic and Magic I would get this sort of angst about it knowing that it would require my fullest attention and that if I chose to truly “read” it then I would need to pause my efforts — and thereby my internal reflective query of — Kelly’s remarkable text.
However, I’d also been carrying John Lachs’ “The Cost of Comfort” with me as my ‘out-of-house’ reading and upon concluding it I was left feeling that T&M was the natural direction to take because it seemed to deal with the same issues Lachs was exploring in TCoC. I will admit that it was rough going at first in part due to feeling conflicted about setting Kelly’s book aside but also because the first chapter, wherein Campagna aims to survey “the roots of our current crisis of reality” (p. 19) required a good deal of active-reflection on my part to comprehend.
According to Campagna’s framing, “This is a book for those who lie defeated by history and by the present. It isn’t a manual to turn the current defeat into a future triumph, but a rumour about a passage hidden within the battlefield leading to a forest beyond it”. This metaphoric portal into the text struck a deep cord within my psyche making the time spent in my sketchbook writing out section summaries and conceptualizing ideas with diagrams and illustrative imagery feel like time well spent each day. Through this circumabulation of the text, I began to adopt a true familiarity with the work and to hear its reverberant message.
Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality is an incredibly astute work observing the cultural gravity of our world’s current paradigm. Campagna begins with his own process of becoming disillusioned with the socio-political machinery of society and its apparent incapability to resolve the issues humanity faces. It is quite possible that the political node within the noosphere of some number of my readership has just hardened into one political stance or another and become ready to either refute me or support me based on the label my team subscribes to.
However, as Campagna makes clear over the first third of the book the issue here is not a political one but a cosmogonic one. Campagna states,
“when we blame our exploitation onto supposedly existing ‘capitalists’ or to a particular economic system, should be taken once again as a form of nostalgic superstition. Considering work merely in its specific historical dimension, as economic/social/political/etc. activity, means remaining oblivious to the cosmogonic quality which it has acquired under the current unreality-system.” (2018, p. 87).
For many of us, this type of realization feeds a tendency toward akrasia, or the avoidance of further thought or speculation around the ambiguity of our situation in favor of continuing to feed on the information streams of the dominant paradigm so as to avoid any risk of experiencing a cognitive dissonance around the question of our existence and our place within the world.
Campagna goes on to provide a pragmatic description of the shared reality-system we are all participating in knowingly or unknowingly. And as Simone de Beauvoir so completely argued in Ethics of Ambiguity (1965) to acquire the truth of ourselves one “must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it” (1965, p.13). Campagna meticulously and elegantly shines light into the dark recesses of the contemporary cosmogony we find ourselves pinned down by. Campagna describes the form and functions of the current reality-system, ‘Technic’, to weave a cohesive paradigmatic understanding of the lived-world we as a species have unintentionally cursed ourselves to dwell within.
At its highest level, Campagna describes Technic as follows;
“The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is superficially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a set of fundamental metaphysical axioms. These axioms combine together in an overall system, which is the reality-system of our age. A reality-system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age. At the same time, however, it is also a cosmogonic force: its metaphysical settings and parameters actually create the world — if for ‘world’, as the Greek cosmos or the Latin mundus, we understand precisely the product of an act of ordering chaos. Here comes the mythological aspect of my eikos mythos [‘likely story’]. It is possible, narratively at least, to present this cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose world-making activity is revealed by its internal structure. I chose to call the cosmogonic form of our age, ‘Technic’. (Campagna, p. 5)
Within that highest-tier cosmogony, there are 5 functional hypostases — or underlying core components — each of which is observable through its archetypal incarnation within the world (Campagna, 2018, p. 62)
I will leave it up to the reader to further familiarize themself with the five hypostases through their own reading of the text and instead draw attention to Campagna’s claim that the influence of these aspects of Technic as our inherited reality-paradigm has resulted in an imminent threat to our agency as well as to our individual and collective ability to act toward or even to imagine alternative ways of being. As Campagna states,
“We are unable to act differently, or to think and imagine differently, because of the absence, within the present system of unreality, of the basic requirements to implement any alternative course of action and imagination. Who could act differently, if the only method to affirm our legitimate presence in the world, as abstract general entities, is to coincide with our very actions, which we undertake as processors within series, and in the exclusive interest of their expansion? How could we think differently, if the seemingly endless horizon of possible alternative courses of action is in fact reducible to their function as productive series in Technic’s own cosmogony? How could we approach action and imagination with a renewed spirit and desire, as long as we, AGEs, are constitutively unable to function as centres of volition?” (2018, p. 18)
The dominance of Technic’s paradigm has largely reduced us
to a pure assemblage of pieces of information, that is, of instrumental units, finds him/herself stuck under such a level of pressure and exploitation, to challenge the weight of any boulder in the Tartarus. At once mutated, torn apart and chained to the mill of the information-process, a human being, like every other existent, cannot but scream in pain. This might be a silent scream, like that of depression or of the stoic suicide of animals in captivity, but the pain which it conveys remains all the more authentic. (Campagna, p. 83–84)
I believe that “Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality” is one of the most important philosophical works of the 21st century. Having some sense of the audience that may pause in the rush of the day to read this semi-lengthy, non-dopamine-triggering, non-intoxicating, mini-essay about a difficult book [difficult books being the height of non-intoxication for most of us!] I acknowledge that I am making a massive and as of yet, unsubstantiated claim here. Point granted.
The thing is, it is so supremely easy to form a contrarian position in one’s mind when presented with a statement like that above, and if I were to start listing reasons why it is so important it would be even easier for my contrarian reader to double-down on that contrarian-ness by contradicting my logically presented points and then walking away from the ‘exchange’ between text and reader feeling as though one knows all that one needs to know of T&M via the set of propositions I’d provided and thus simply condemn me and the book to the trashbin of ones own thought. I write this because I am sure I have done the same sort of thing innumerable times in my life. There is only so much time to devote our attention to any single object of consciousness and so out of habit perhaps we are prone to root out that which we do not see being a contributor to any payoff resulting from the investment of our attention.
I understand.
Even still, I implore you to read this book because I am certain that in the end, you will come to understand that the book was worth the hours of effort you put into it during your valued and ever-diminishing time cloistered away with a revered object of conscious attention.
Regardless of your outlook on my review of the work or on my claim regarding its importance you. the reader will be left with the ultimate authority over the validity of my claim. So purchase a copy of the book, read it, and then decide whether my statement is hyperbolic nonsense or a valid belief. If you locate the space in your life to test out the validity of my claim (or better yet, to forget about my claim altogether and read the book anyway) then I believe that we will both be better for it.
It appears that the book has not achieved a large enough readership in my country at least so its arguments are not getting the attention they deserve. T&M only came onto my radar because a year and a half ago I listened to a discussion of its general ideas on the Weird Studies Podcast in which two academics wade through ‘texts’ that either lay outside of the orienting popular culture or those within the culture that the hosts feel have meanings that are not commonly held or discussed. If it were not for their discussion of the book in November of 2022 I am quite certain I never would have come across it as I have never seen it on the shelves of any of the bookstores I frequent, nor has it been suggested to me by any of the various algorithms I interact with, nor have I heard it addressed or discussed by more popularized outlets of philosophy.
So, please give this fool the benefit of the doubt and obtain a copy of this book and whether you love it or hate it, write reviews and recommend it to others you know who may be up for a good philosophical romp. Read Timothy Morton’s preface for a high-level overview, read the introduction, and familiarize yourself with the Five Hypostasis of Technic’s cosmogony. If the book still has not caught your attention and desire for difference, then, I suppose, you are free to move on to your next read.
However, if these sections of the book have begun to draw you in, then take the risk entailed by setting your other readings aside and join me in wading through the dark waters of Technic and Magic and away from the known shores of what is toward the novelty of the unknown.
References
Campagna, F. (2018). Technic and magic: The reconstruction of reality. Bloomsbury Publishing.
De Beauvoir, S. (1962). The ethics of ambiguity, tr. Citadel Press.
Kelly, S. (1993). Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path Toward Wholeness (Jung and Spirituality). Paulist Press.
Lachs, J. (2019). The cost of comfort. Indiana University Press.