Identialism as the Highest Stage of Dualism (cont’d)

An excerpt from a Victor Pelevin novel, in my translation.  Part II.
  May 3, 2001

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The displacing impulse suppresses and displaces from the mind of a person any psychic processes that can hinder the person’s complete identification with a cell of oranus.  This impulse arises when a psychic stimulus lacks oral or anal components.  The displacing impulse is a jammer that blocks the transmissions of an undesirable radio station by generating loud interference.  Its effect is perfectly captured by such sayings as “Money talks, bullshit walks” and “If you are so clever, show me your money.”  Without this effect, oranus would not be able to make people act as its cells.  Since the displacing impulse blocks all the subtle psychic processes that are not directly related to the circulation of money, people come to perceive the world exclusively as a manifestation of oranus.  This leads to dreadful consequences.  Here is how a broker from the floor of the London commodity exchange described his vision: “The world is a place where business meets money.”

To say that this psychic state is widespread is an understatement.  All the research of modern economics, sociology and anthropology essentially boils down to the description of the metabolic and somatic processes of oranus.

By its nature oranus is a primitive virtual parasitic life form.  Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it does not attach itself to a single host organism but rather turns other organisms into its cells.  Its every cell is a human being with unlimited possibilities and a natural right to freedom.  The paradox is that from an evolutionary point of view, oranus’s organism is at a level substantially lower than that of any of its cells.  It is incapable of abstract thought or even self-reflection.  One could well say that in reality, the famous eye in a triangle portrayed on a one-dollar bill does not see anything.  It was simply painted on the wall of the pyramid by some artist from the city of Odessa and that’s as far as the story goes.  We had better cover this eye with a black patch to avoid getting schizophrenia-prone conspiracy theorists unduly excited.

Oranus has no ears, nose, eyes or intelligence.  It is definitely not “evil incarnate,” nor some hellish monster as certain representatives of the religious business claim.  It has no desires of its own for it is incapable of desiring anything abstract.  It is a senseless polyp devoid of emotions and intentions, which swallows and excretes only void.  At the same time, each of its cells is capable of realizing that it is not a cell of oranus but rather that oranus is merely one of the trifling objects in its mind.  It is to block this realization that oranus needs the displacing impulse.

Oranus used to have only a vegetative nervous system.  The advent of electronic mass media means that oranus has evolved and developed a central nervous system.  Its main nerve endings are televisions and today they reach every one.  We have already discussed the process of the replacement of a TV viewer’s consciousness with the consciousness of a virtual Homo Zapiens.  Let us now examine the operational mechanics of the three wow-impulses.

In theory, a man in his normal state is capable of recognizing and resisting wow-impulses.  However, Homo Zapiens in his state of unconscious mind-meld with a TV broadcast ceases to be an individual and becomes a mere consciousness.  A subject number two can analyze its surroundings no more than a tape recording of a cock’s crow can.  Even the illusion of him critically evaluating the events presented on screen is merely part of an induced psychic process.

Every several minutes a television program (and therefore the consciousness of subject number two) has a commercial break.  Each commercial is a complex, thoroughly thought out combination of anal, oral and displacing wow-impulses which resonate with the different cultural layers of one’s psyche.

To draw a rough physical analogy, the patient is first put to sleep (subject number two displaces subject number one) and then subjected to accelerated hypnosis.  The memories at each stage of this hypnosis are cemented by conditional reflexive links.

At some point subject number two turns off his TV and becomes subject number one, that is, a normal person.  After that he is no longer directly subjected to the three wow-impulses.  However, an effect remains similar to residual magnetism.  The person’s mind itself begins to produce wow-inducements.  They come continually and can be likened to a backdrop against which all other thoughts arise.  While a subject in the state of HZ is under the influence of the three wow-impulses, the subject that has returned into his normal condition is under the influence of three wow-factors, which are automatically generated by his brain.

One’s continual and systematic immersion into HZ-state and subjection to the displacing wow-impulse leads to the creation of a sort of a mental filter.  This filter allows only the absorption of information that has oral/anal content.  Thus a person does not even have the chance to question his true nature.

What is his true nature?

For reasons that go beyond the scope of this discussion, only the person himself or herself can answer this question.  As miserable as his current state is, a common man can find the answer.  Subject number two, however, cannot find the answer because he does not exist.  Despite that (or perhaps because of that), the media system of oranus, which conducts the three wow-impulses through the informational space, raises the question of self-identification before HZ.

This is where the most interesting and paradoxical part begins.  Subject number two has no immanent nature of his own.  Therefore, the only way for him to resolve the self-identification issue is to define himself through the combination of material objects shown on television that he is certain do not comprise any part of him.  This is akin to apophatic theology, which defines God through what he is not, only here we are dealing with apophatic anthropology.

For subject number two, the answer to the question “Who am I?” can only take the form of “I am someone who drives such-and-such a car, lives in such-and-such a house, wears such-and-such clothes, etc.”  His self-identification is only possible through the making of a list of products that he consumes.  The only way to transform subject number two is to change the entries on the list.  For this reason, most of the products being advertised are associated with a certain type of personality, or a certain trait, or predilection.  As a result, a fairly convincing combination of such traits and predilections can be put together which will resemble a real person.  The number of possible combinations and the ability to choose among them are virtually limitless.  A commercial will articulate:  “I am a calm, self-assured person; therefore I buy red slippers.”  A subject of the second kind who wishes to add calmness and self-assuredness to his arsenal of traits will do so by remembering to buy red slippers.  The corresponding subject of the first kind will later buy the red slippers under the influence of the anal wow-factor.  In its classic form, oral-anal stimulation becomes looped like the famous snake that bites its own tail: a million dollars is necessary to buy a house in a nice neighborhood; the house is necessary to have some place to wear red slippers; the red slippers are necessary to acquire the calmness and self-assuredness required to earn a million dollars to buy a house in which to wear red slippers and acquire calmness and self-assuredness.

When oral-anal stimulation short-circuits like that, one can say that the goal of advertising magic has been fulfilled: an illusory structure has been created with nothing at its core, although all things and characteristics are referenced through the figment of this core, the so-called identity.

Identity is subject of the second kind at the stage in his development when he is able to exist independently, without continuous activation by the three wow-impulses.  At that stage, activation by the three residual wow-factors generated by his mind is sufficient.

To put it simply, identity is a fake ego.  In their analysis of the of modern man’s state, bourgeois thinkers conclude that breaking through identity back to one’s own ego is a tremendous spiritual feat.  This may well be true, for the ego does not exist in relative terms; nor identity, in absolute terms.  The problem is that the feat is not feasible because there is nowhere to break through from, nowhere to break through to, and no one left to do the breaking.  Still, we concede that the slogans “Back to the ego!” and “Forward to the ego!” under these circumstances possess æsthetic validity, if not meaning.

The imposition of the three wow-impulses over the subtler processes that take place in the human psyche spawns modern culture in all its mediocre variety.  The displacing impulse plays a special role here.  It is akin to the thundering of a pneumatic drill drowning out all other sounds.  All external stimuli save wow-oral and wow-anal get filtered out and the person loses interest in anything that lacks oral or anal components.  Our brief work does not explore the sexual side of advertising but we would like to note that sex has increasingly become attractive solely because of its symbolization of the vital potency that evidences money-making prowess, and not the other way around.  Any competent psychoanalyst will confirm this.  In the end, the modern man has deep-rooted distrust of anything that does not involve the ingestion or excretion of money.

The outward manifestation of this is that life gets duller as people become increasingly dry and niggardly.  Bourgeois science commonly explains this new pattern of behavior as an attempt to preserve and conserve emotional energy necessitated by the corporate economy and the modern lifestyle.  In reality, there is no dearth of emotions in people’s lives.  The real reason is that the unremitting influence of the displacing wow-factor leads to emotional energy being redirected towards psychic processes linked to oral or anal wow-themes.  Many bourgeois experts understand intuitively the importance of mass media in the paradigmatic shift that is taking place but, to paraphrase comrade Allende Jr., they are “looking for a black cat which has never existed in a dark room which will never exist.”  Even when they call television a crutch for the shriveled-up, withered ego, or claim that the media are inflating a personality that has stopped being real, they are missing the main point.

The main point is that only a personality that was real to begin with can become unreal.  To shrivel up and wither, an ego must first have existed.  In the discussion above and in our previous work (see “The Russian Question and Sendero Luminoso”), we have demonstrated the falsity of these assumptions.

The influence of the displacing wow-factor reduces the culture and art of the Dark Ages to oral-anal motifs.  The main characteristic of such art, in a nutshell, is mouthassedness.

A black bag stuffed with one hundred dollar bills has already become an important cultural symbol and a focal point of most films and books.  The bag’s path as it moves through live has become the main inspiration behind a plot.  More precisely, it is the presence of the bag in a work of art that generates the emotional interest of the audience in the events that take place on screen or in the text.  Note that in some cases the bag with money is not immediately present but its functions are then fulfilled either by the presence of so-called “stars” who are definitely known to have such bags at home, or by obtrusive touting of the film’s budget or its performance at the box office.  In the future, no work of art will be created for its own sake.  We should expect to witness soon the appearance of movies and books whose content consists mainly of veiled praises of Coke and attacks on Pepsi, or vice versa.

Being exposed to a network of oral-anal impulses, a person develops an internal auditor that constantly measures reality against the restrictive yardstick of material well-being.  This auditor also doles out punishment in the form of unbearable pain inflicted upon one’s mind by cognitive dissonance.  Figuratively speaking, the oral wow-impulse is associated with a little flag raised by the internal auditor that says “loser”.  The anal wow-impulse is associated with a little flag that says “winner”.  The displacing wow-impulse corresponds to the state when the internal auditor raises both the “loser” and “winner” flags at the same time.

We distinguish three established types of identity.  They are:

• the oral wow-type (manifests as obsessive desire for money and the centering of all emotional and psychic activity around that desire);
• the anal wow-type (manifests as the voluptuous excretion of money or handling of objects that proxy for money; this latter pattern is also called anal wow-exhibitionism);
• the displaced wow-type (can be combined with any variant of the first two types)—characterized by complete inability to receive any stimuli except for oral and anal ones.

This classification is relative in the sense that the same identity can be anal to those who stand below it in the wow-hierarchy and oral to those who stand above it (there is, of course, no “identity unto itself” for we are talking about a pure epiphenomenon).  A linear wow-hierarchy comprised of a number of identities so ordered is called the corporate ladder.  It is a social perpetuum mobile of sorts, for every identity constantly has to compare itself against the identity which stands one rung higher.  The popular articulation of this great principle is “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Ordered along a corporate ladder, people resemble fish stringed on a line.  But in our case, the fish are still alive.  What is more, they move along the ladder, urged by the oral and anal wow-factors, in the direction that they think is up.  They do it out of instinct or the drive to fulfill the meaning of life, as the case may be.  Recall that from the point of view of economic metaphysics, the meaning of life lies in transforming an oral identity into an anal one.

The situation is not limited to a subject’s self-perception as an identity, brought about by the influence of the three residual wow-factors.  When the subject comes in contact with another person, he sees before him just another identity.  Anything that could possibly characterize a person has already been referenced within the oral-anal coordinate space by the culture of the Dark Ages; it has been placed by this culture into the context of immeasurable mouthassedness.

A displaced wow-person assesses anyone he meets as an infomercial, a video full of commercial information.  The other person’s appearance, speech and mannerisms are immediately processed as a set of wow-symbols.  A very quick, uncontrollable process arises whereby sequences of anal, oral and displacing impulses rise and fall in one’s mind.  This is how interpersonal relations are determined.  A famous Latin saying claims that homo homini lupus est.  However, a man has not been a wolf unto another man for quite some time now.  A man unto another man is not even an image-maker, or a dealer, or a killer, or an exclusive distributor, no matter what the modern sociologists say.  The truth is much more simple and frightening.  A man unto another man is wow; and not unto another man, at that, but unto just another wow.  Therefore if we project the Latin saying onto the modern cultural reference space, we will get “A wow unto a wow is a wow!”, or, closer to the original Latin, wow wow wow.

These observations relate not just to other people but to everything that comes to our attention.  When assessing something before us, we feel extreme sadness if we cannot recognize any familiar stimuli.  A certain binarization of consciousness takes place within us: every little thing factors out into a linear combination of anal and oral vectors.  Every image acquires a definite expression in monetary terms.  Even if the image is decidedly non-commercial, the first question that arises is how valuable this non-commercial quality can be in commercial terms.  This is the reason for the feeling, familiar to everyone, that it’s all about money.

It is indeed all about money because money itself has become about money a long time ago, and everything else is banned.  Oral-anal stirrings have become the sole allowed psychic reaction.  Any other activity of the mind is blocked.

Subject of the second kind is a perfect automaton because he is an echo of electromagnetic impulses in the television tube.  His only freedom is to say “Wow!” every time he buys something new (usually, another television).  That is why oranus’s controlling impulses are called wow-impulses and the unconscious ideology of identialism is call wowerism.  So far as the political regime that corresponds to wowerism is concerned, it is sometimes called telecracy, or mediacracy, since under it, the object of elections (and even their subject, as we have shown above) is a TV program.  It bears reminding that “democracy”, a word used frequently in the modern media, does not at all mean the same today as it did in the 19th and the early 20th centuries.  This is a case of two homonyms: the old “democracy” came from the Greek word “demos”, which means the people, whereas the new “democracy” is derived from the word “demo”, as in “demo version”.

Let us now recapitulate what we have learned.

Identialism is dualism at the stage of development when the largest corporations are finishing up the remaking of the human consciousness.  This consciousness is constantly subjected to the oral, anal, and displacing wow-impulses and consequently begins to generate independently the three wow-factors.  The result is a persistent and continuous displacement of personality and the rise in its place of so-called identity.  Identialism is dualism with three specific features: it is (a) dead; (b) decomposed; and (c) digitized.

Although we could give many different definitions of identity, such an exercise would be futile for in reality, identity does not exist.  While at the previous stages of human history one could talk about people oppressing people, or abstract ideas oppressing people, one cannot talk of oppression in the age of identialism.  At this stage, anyone who might have needed to be liberated has disappeared into thin air.

For this reason the catastrophe prophesied for so long by the Christians and looming over us as the inevitable result of the wowerization of consciousness—the end of the world—will be harmless in every possible sense of the word.  There is no one left who can be harmed.  The end of the world will be just another television show, and this, my comrades, fills us all with indescribable bliss.

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