On Magic

I've been painting a lot.

I'm going to borrow an idea from Flusser, and then probably make a terrible mess of it. The idea is magic, and I'm borrowing it from his essay on photography. The underlying idea he's talking about is of a culture, usually an ancient one, that treats time as cyclic. Everything repeats. The sun rises and sets. Winter is followed by spring. The animals migrate, and so on. Flusser is interested in how such a culture transitions to a linear one, one of endless progress, where time is viewed as a straight line. He identifies writing as a technology that underlies this change, but that probably doesn't matter here.

You can name the linear time approach as Modernism, or Manifest Destiny, and probably a 1000 other names. Currently we have a lot of idiots in the tech industry describing the same idea as accelerationism.

In the world of cyclic time we have a lot of what I am going to call ritual magic in which some repetitive and usually tedious activity is done for probably unreasonably long, producing, sometimes, a result. A rain dance is ritual magic. You dance for days, and sometimes rain happens. Agriculture is also ritual magic. You dig a furrow with your stick. Then you dig another one. And another one. You plant a seed, you plant a seed, you plant a seed. Some months later, sometimes, food happens.

Washing dishes, sweeping the floor, doing laundry, painting a picture. These are all ritual magic. You manifest clean dishes, clean floors, clean clothes, or a picture, through a series of boring repetitive steps that go on far too long.

Modernism, the human urge to progress, constantly seeks to press the boring steps of ritual magic into a machine. We seek to rid ourselves of the tedious, the repetitive. The "work" of a human should only be the novel parts of the task, the decisions which differ every time through. If you repeat a step, you should automate that step.

We've been doing this forever. Prayer wheels, which specifically automate the tedious work of prayer, have been around for almost 2000 years. Agriculture has been automated more and more, since its inception (anyone who has done agriculture can appreciate this trend, farming is terrible.) Picture making has been automated with the camera, and now with generative AI.

Rather than manifesting a picture by tediously applying pigment to a surface one daub at a time, the camera largely reduces the process to one of making a small number of decisions. Mostly, you're making the choices that are specific to the picture at hand. Generative AI eliminates virtually all of the remaining repetitive tasks (setting up lights, setting up the tripod, checking batteries, blah blah blah) and reduces picture making almost completely to "what is specific to this task, what is novel."

Modernism is built around what is knowable. If you can know how a task manifests its result, you can build a machine to do the task (in principle.) You can automate picture making, farming, dishwashing. You cannot automate a rain dance, because you don't know how it works. You literally do not know the "mechanism" and so cannot "mechanize" it. In a meaningful way, there is no mechanism to know, but see below. Nevertheless, at some level, humans don't really distinguish between rain dances and agriculture. You do the thing over and over and over, and sometimes a result occurs.

It's "ritual magic."

The modernist version, in which the repetitive tasks are shoved into a machine, let's call that "technical magic."

A camera is technical magic, a painting is ritual magic. More or less. There's probably no strict line between technical and ritual magic, but there's definitely two big lumps at the ends of the spectrum.

Once you get your arms around this framing, you see it absolutely everywhere. Walking versus driving. Cooking versus ordering out. Religion versus secularism. It's all the same thing.

The observation I'm working my way around to is that people like ritual magic. We like the results of it, and we like doing it. It tickles something inside us.

Receiving a hand-written letter hits differently from a typed letter hits differently from an email. A home cooked lasagne is different from a restaurant lasagne, and is meaningfully "better" even if the latter is objectively better. If we have to do a lot of ritual magic, it's less fun. Ritual is boring and difficult.

Modernism struggles to insert itself here. Modern affluent people often look for ritual in modernist ways. They want to find themselves by traveling to South America and taking drugs in a clean and well ordered retreat. Nobody wants to just wash the goddamned dishes.

I think it's safe to say that the results of ritual magic are generally appreciated. You might not like my painting, but you appreciate the work of making it. What people generally try to dodge or dress up is the work of ritual magic. We want to use technical magic to produce the result of ritual. At this exact moment, we have a ton of people who are trying to use generative AI to become artists, to make art. It's not so much that the pictures suck, although they do, it's that there is an inherent conflict between ritual and technology. You cannot use technical magic to produce ritual results. You have to do the work.

If you serve someone takeout as if you cooked it yourself, you might get away with it but you'll know, and anyways you probably won't get away with it and now you've fucked up a relationship.

Humans have many ways of "knowing" things. The first is more or less rational, we follow chains of causes and effects, modus ponens and all that stuff. Philosophers like to get fancy about this, but roughly speaking we "know" about the world of stuff we can hit, or drown in, or set on fire. At the same time, though, we also like to "know" things through a process of feeling, of "faith" if you will. You can pretend that this is silly, but it's damn near universal. Humans have some sort of built-in affinity for mysticism. Maybe it's just our natural pattern matching mental machinery gone amok (we danced last year, and it rained, let's dance again) or maybe there's something meaningfully "real" that we cannot know by hitting stuff. Those questions are outside the scope of these remarks, and it doesn't matter for our purposes here.

Technical magic is essentially executed by moving from the epistemology of mysticism to the epistemology of rationalaity. If we can identify the parts of the ritual that are, in the terms of the rational way of knowing, are efficacious, then we can insert that ritual into a machine. The rain dance "doesn't work" in those rational terms, if you measure things you find that in the terms of rationality, of cause and effect, of science, rain dances do not produce rain. In mystical terms, in the faith-based way of knowing, rain dances work fine, however. To say "rain dances don't work" is to commit to the modernist epistemology, the way of knowing which leads to linear time, to progress, to science, and also to manifest destinty, colonialism, and so on.

You're welcome to reject mystical epistemologies! I have no particular dog in this hunt. But the day-to-day manifestation of those ways of thinking are rituals, and humans have a potent affinity for ritual. To acknowledge that you love getting a hand written letter more than you love an email is to reject modernism, and to embrace a kind of mysticism. The hand written letter is objectively inferior in every way, it's hard to read, it's slow to create, it's slow to deliver. It has literally no advantages, and yet, we like getting them.

To enjoy a painting is in a sense to reject modernism, and to embrace a mystical approach to the world. Again it is in every way inferior to a photograph, except some vague and contested "sense of artistry" or whatever the hell you want to call it. Whatever it is that you see in a painting as an advantage is essentially rooted in an epistemology that is not modern.

The only practical thing that comes out of all these ruminations that I've been able to find is this: don't think of washing dishes as a chore, but rather an an act of ritual magic which manifests clean dishes.

Beyond that I think it's useful to acknowledge that we, as humans, like these ritual things both as doers and consumers. We like at least the idea of cooking a meal from scratch, and we certainly like eating it. We should also realize what we're about, and not muddle up ritual magic with technical magic. The point is the process. If you cheat at the ritual magic and actually execute it technically, you're doing it wrong by definition.

If what you seek is food, by all means order out. If what you're actually looking for is the warmth of the human condition, buy some onions and whatnot, and cook.

Or, you know, make a painting.