AS ABOVE SO BELOW
A CYCLE OF SHIT WITHOUT END



(HEAD #3 was on religion)


  Religion undoubtedly surpasses every other human activity in
sheer quantity and variety of bullshit. If you also consider its
role as the accomplice of class domination throughout history,
it is little wonder that it has earned the contempt and hatred
of increasing numbers of people everywhere. 

"When the real world transforms into images, images become real
things and act as the motivations of hypnotic behaviour." 

  There have been many critiques of religion. But few as
thorough and extensive as those of the Situationists, who did
not limit their analysis to the actions of religion but expanded
from this into the modern secularised counterparts of religion:
the spectacle, sacrificial loyalty (to countries, leaders,
companies etc.), and so on. Religion holds no privileged place
in the totality of analysis other than a spectacular commodity
par excellence.

  The materialist attack was not enough though. Religion simply
shifted ground into the spectacle. It disengaged itself from its
social and historical development and became a pure object, an
absolute commodity in the sense that it deregulated its
disparate and contradictory elements. 


Television is like an asshole pointing at the moon. Which moon
do you watch?


Techniques and rituals that were once practical technologies for
the reprogramming of behaviour and thought patterns were
required to be so once again or disappear. Within the videodrome
these elements became free floating recombinant video DNA
matter. Hermetically sealed in a vacuum tube that is anathema to
real life, they are thus able to align and realign to a variety
of attacks against the autonomous imagination, but they do not
act alone, they are a part of the totality of spectacular
strategy.

When you are hermetically sealed in the videodrome there is no
escape.

Religion operates both of the twin reflective switches that
activate video spectacular life: control (authority and
obedience) and behaviour (production and consumption). Within
religion image is ossified as Icon: the enigma of an image more
real than the commodity it represents - a pure fetish devoid of
inexpedient utility. In short the ideal subject for the
operations of spectacular hype (a miraculating relationship
between desiring machines and the body without organs). As such
it has entered the realm of Video DNA Life. It moves and mutates
with the virulence of a genetically engineered epidemic. More
deadly than AIDS.

  The neo-religious trips are polymorphous in their perversity.
They no longer de-limit themselves within acts of devotion,
consecration and worship. They now incorporate diverse and
extreme psychological therapies appropriated from the prisons
and mental institutions of the most repressive regimes in the
world. 

TV is a pulpit in an abattoir. We watch as our own bodies and
our own blood are sold back to us.

The global village has become a global gulag wrapped in new age
glamour, or the charismatic insincerity of tellevangelism. We
are supplied with an endless variety of spectacular choices
between this commodity or that but behind the fluorescent
flickerings of the cathode ray tube the spectacular oppositions
form a unity of misery.


In the videodrome no one can hear you scream.

  It is this misery that forms the motivation for not only
religion but revolution. Religion is simply the recuperation of
radical dissatisfaction into a controllable form of
exploitation. People are dissatisfied with their own moral
poverty. In everyday life we are encouraged to be mean, petty
and vindictive. We all, in one way or another, end up
surrendering our dignity and integrity just to survive.
Religions tackle these moral and social problems, fitting them
within a structured framework of paranoid despotism, in order to
give meaning to the most minute of actions. Desire is a powerful
weapon. We should not let it be constricted. The established
religions have long manipulated the desire for morality, but in
a negative and judgmental manner based around the concept of
guilt. True morality is without judgement.


The shit we step in is not the real shit.

  Within spectacular discourse guilt is one of the specific
technologies derived from Christian doctrine. Within the
spectacle as within Christianity guilt serves specific functions
as a self perpetuating machine for the manufacturing of
suffering and more guilt - a tautological teleology. For
Christianity the existence of suffering means that life is
essentially unjust and blameworthy. Because of this life must be
justified, or to use Christian terminology; redeemed/saved. The
way that life is redeemed is through more suffering (penance
etc.) and so the vicious cycle of pain and guilt internalises
itself in a grotesque parody of Christ on the cross.

"You can't die for Jesus if you don't kill for Jesus" - David
Koresh.

 "What have I done to deserve this?" The attitude is as
pervasive as the air we breathe, invasive as nerve gas. This is
the way that all spectacular religions work within the
videodrome; every form of oppression is proof of life's
blame-worthiness and is thus to be endured, internalised and
amplified as penance for that suffering (This is materially
manifested by the videodrome in the economic practises of credit
with the internalisation and internationalisation of debt).
Spectacular religions are a chain of paranoid machines that
along with other technologies of reterritorialisation
(economics, psychology, architecture, etc.) form a network of
lines of domination - a despotic regime. How very different they
are from indigenous and shamanic religions. 

  Within traditional European religions, such as the cults of
Dionysus, Odin and other shamanic religions around the world,
life is essentially just. The beauty and intensity of life
justifies the harshest of sufferings. Shamanic religions do not
internalise pain, they affirm it in its externality. Dionysus
and Odin suffer from an abundance of life and in this they make
suffering an affirmation just as they make ecstatic intoxication
an activity. Those religions, like Christianity, that suffer
from a paucity of life make intoxication a convulsion, a
numbness, they make suffering an accusation against life, a
negation, a whinging puritanical misery. For the shaman life is
holy enough to justify an immensity of suffering.

  The Situationists are right to point out and affirm the
playful aspect of radical action and the radical aspect of the
playful. It forms a concise theoretical explanation and
justification for apparently meaningless actions (vandalism,
riots, etc.), but this does not mean that revolutionary activity
is by definition pleasurable or that pleasure is by definition
revolutionary. Much depends on a careful analysis of context and
timing. 

If an electron is fired in a vacuum and there is no one there
to see it does it make any light?


  It is well known that Taoism and Zen are the inspiration
behind many aspects of martial arts. Their meditative techniques
allow a suppression of ego consciousness which allows a
sensitivity to the energy of situations. This sensitivity allows
correct intervention so that an opponent's energy may be used
against them with the minimum of effort. It is their sense of
internal balance, centring, that allows them to act with perfect
equipoise and timing.

  Power does not have to flow in only one direction. There is
always room for reversal and subversion. Every vector of power
is a battleground for these individuated forms of
psycho-spiritual technology where they either win or concede
control. We should be aware that as we prise control from one
paradigm we should not subject ourselves to another, but
instead, should actively invest ourselves with power. Theory
should not be built on preferences or political principle but
experience. 

  Theory is like a box of tools. It must be useful. It must
function. Hence, because the videodrome is a total environment
its destruction must be a total environment. All spectacular
religious activities involve the creation of "situations" in
order to impose their map onto the conscious and unconscious
mind. But if you realise that the map is not the territory, the
word is not the world, you can enter into a decoding of these
situations; using the very methods that seek to reprogram your
mind to deprogram it (Christianity is perhaps the least useful
religion to do this with - 1) because it is so closely knitted
into the spectacular paradigm and is thus easily recuperated,
and 2) because, unlike most religions, it is a simple external
doctrine rather than an incorporation of the sacred into the
rituals of everyday life. Thus even Islam would be of more use
in this decoding of the videodrome).


The most important problem is not understanding the difference
between spectacular topography and the material conditions of
the situation, but in applying knowledge of these contradictions
in order to escape automatic re-encodement.

 Once you leave the spectacular consensus you can enter a realm
of difference situated between the abstract relief of the
videodrome and the material relations of the situation. You can
impose your own psycho-emotional maps onto your environment
forcing them to become immanent with meaning - not in an
abstract commodified sense, but in a direct and personal sense.
Through the de-personalisation of ritual you can escape the
traps of individuation allowing direct relationships with
reality where desire can form molecular, non-systematic
associations, i.e. not at the level of an aggregate  personality
(trapped, encoded within the structures of centralised, unified
discourses and vectors of power) but on the level of
deterratorialised flows exempt from the constraints of commodity
exchange.

  It is no longer useful to dismiss religion as superstitious
clap trap. Using a historical, materialist study of religions
within the social configurations of power and desire we can
understand how the apparatus of religious technology can be used
for substantial decodings of spectacular illusion.




Edited and extended from the anti-copyright leaflet "The
Realization and Suppression of Religion" (Ken Knabb and the
Bureau of Public Secrets, USA)


by Grim.