Anything Can Be Used: Notes on the synthesis of desire and knowledge

Abstract

This thesis is centred on an analysis of collage and détournement as artistic and hermeneutic methodologies in a relatively wide sense. It focuses on how the political and theoretical dimensions of détournement, as defined by Situationist theory and practice, can be seen as parallel to - and amalgamated with - specific forms of occult practice and philosophy, particularly alchemy. Arguing that language, art and magic can be usefully understood and applied as technologies that partake in the continuous co-creation of the universe, it is proposed that occult philosophy offers the possibility of alternative forms of language, knowledge and embodiment than those enforced by the creeping totalitarianism of contemporary information technologies and their concomitant imperative to render the world in its totality into quantifiable and hence controllable units of data. Because technological control systems - including religion - are dependent upon a parasitic relationship to human bodies and desires, the critique and transformation of everyday life appears as the field where these issues must ultimately be manifested and brought to fruition.