[...]
It goes without saying that even behind the wheel we rarely actually act like drivers-and we don't need anyone explaining to us how a television, a PlayStation, or a "built environment" conditions us. Instead, a science of apparatuses, a critical metaphysics, recognizes the crisis of presence and is prepared to compete with capitalism on the playing field of magic.
[...]
WE WANT NEITHER VULGAR MATERIALISM NOR AN "ENCHANTED MATERIALISM"; WHAT WE ARE DESCRIBING IS A MATERIALISM OF ENCHANTMENT.
It goes without saying that even behind the wheel we rarely actually act like drivers-and we don't need anyone explaining to us how a television, a PlayStation, or a "built environment" conditions us. Instead, a science of apparatuses, a critical metaphysics, recognizes the crisis of presence and is prepared to compete with capitalism on the playing field of magic.
[...]
WE WANT NEITHER VULGAR MATERIALISM NOR AN "ENCHANTED MATERIALISM"; WHAT WE ARE DESCRIBING IS A MATERIALISM OF ENCHANTMENT.
TO BECOME A SORCERER. " [T]o prevent this disintegration, one must go deliberately to the limit of one's own presence through a clearly-defined practice; one must go to the very essence of the outer limits and master it; the 'spirits' must be identified and evoked and one must develop the power to call upon them at will and profit professionally from their activity. These are the steps taken by the sorcerer; he transforms being-in-the-world's critical moments into a courageous and dramatic decision, that of establishing himself in the world. If being-in-the-world is taken as a given, it runs the risk of being dissolved: it has not yet been given. The magician, through the establishment of his vocation and successful initiation, undoes this presumed given and reforms it through a second birth; he goes to the limits of his presence in order to reform himself into a new and clearly-defined entity. The techniques he uses to increase the instability of presence, the trance itself and other related states, are the expressions of this being-there that disintegrates so that it may be reformed, the being that goes to the very end of its confines in order to discover itself as a sustained and guaranteed presence. The mastery that the magician has acquired allows him to penetrate not only his own instability, bur also that in other people. The magician knows how to go beyond himself, not in the ideal sense, but actually, in the existential sense. The man whose being-there is made a problem and who has the power to establish his own presence, is not just an ordinary presence, bur a being-there that makes itself present to others, understands their existemial drama and influences its course."24
- Tiqqun, This is Not a Program
