(eng)

eden_jeneses & Omon Wynfryth: The dark factories of (definitely not China but) desire and the search for the quintessential Urreligion

2025.10.16. – 2025.10.30.

To invert the Platonic cave is to displace the centuries old topology of appearance and truth. In our psychotic and paranoid counter-allegory, what presents itself as the open-source “outside” — the luminous surface of the world — is not the domain of the real but the theatre of information and meta-media, a regime of visibility sustained by cybernetics, surveillance, and deception. Relative truth does not dwell in this supposed openness but in the subterranean, beneath the strata of appearances, where it withdraws from immediate apprehension. Illusion is expansive, airy, and seductive, an infernal multitude of desires — it is what ensnares us in the infinite feedback loops of Capitalism III. Truth, by contrast, is compressed, concealed, and accessible only through descent into the underground: the esoteric strata, the levels and stages of gnostic knowledge — though no longer in the recognisable form of mysticism or religion. The task of thought, therefore, is not ascent toward the Sun but a labor of rouge and revolutionary excavation: disputing and negating the inherited dichotomies of light and dark, surface and depth, and cultivating precisely the noisy atmospheres necessary to disrupt their circuits. It is a turning downward into opacity, where the real persists as that which resists the dazzling falsity of surface light, of “illumination.”

What in antiquity appeared as religious mystery became, in modernity, the state secret, and today it has further mutated into the military and corporate secret, buried in the “depths” of servers, databanks, and encrypted networks. A curious parallel emerges: the guardians of such secrets present themselves as defenders of the people, the state, and security — thereby placing themselves beyond the very laws that bind others. (A Licence to Drill.) Former CIA operatives routinely describe their work conditions as indistinguishable from those of a cult or sect: a severance from the outside world, with all life organised around the acquisition, stratification, and preservation of knowledge. The categories of “Classified,” “Official,” “Confidential,” “Trade Secret,” and “Top Secret” are not merely bureaucratic designations but initiatory thresholds, regulating access to fragmented and never fully possessable layers of knowledge. In our inverted cave-topography, secrecy is no longer sacred but procedural, yet it performs the same function, separating the elect from the profane multitude, while the Dominion of the Normies decays into the hyperreality of our desiring-machines.

(zh)

伊登·杰内塞斯 & 奥蒙·温弗里斯：

《欲望的黑暗工厂——（绝非中国的）原始宗教之探寻》

2025年10月16日－2025年10月30日

倒转柏拉图洞穴寓言，就是要位移那延续数百年的“显现与真理”的拓扑学。在我们这则充满精神错乱与偏执的反寓言中，所谓开放源代码式的“外部”——世界的光明表层——并不是现实的领域，而是信息与元媒介的剧场，一个由控制论、监视与欺骗维系的可见性政体。相对的真理并不栖居在这种假定的开放中，而是潜藏在地下、隐藏于表象层之下，从直接把握中退却。幻象是扩张的、轻盈的、诱惑的，是无数地狱般的欲望——它使我们陷入资本主义3.0无尽的反馈回路之中。相比之下，真理是压缩的、隐匿的，唯有通过向地下的下降才能进入：那是秘传的地层，是诺斯替式知识的阶段与层次——尽管它已不再以可辨识的神秘主义或宗教形式出现。因此，思想的任务并非向着太阳的上升，而是一次赤色与革命性的掘进：争辩并否定光与暗、表层与深度这些继承的二元对立，并有意培育恰恰足以扰乱其电路的嘈杂氛围。这是一种向下转入晦暗的运动，在那里，真实以一种抵抗表面光辉、抵抗“启蒙”的虚假炫目而持续存在。

在古代，宗教的奥秘以神秘仪式呈现；在近代，它成为国家机密；而在今日，它进一步变异为军事与企业的机密，被深埋在服务器、数据库与加密网络的“深处”。于是出现了一种奇特的平行：这些秘密的守护者自我塑造成人民、国家与安全的捍卫者——因而将自己置于约束他人的法律之外。（钻探的执照。）前CIA特工常常描述他们的工作环境与邪教或宗派别无二致：与外部世界隔绝，所有生活都围绕着知识的获取、分层与保存而组织起来。“非机密”“正式”“机密”“商业秘密”“绝密”这些类别，并非仅仅是官僚性的标签，而是启蒙的门槛，用来规制进入那些永远无法完全占有的知识层次。在我们倒转的洞穴拓扑中，秘密已不再是神圣的，而是程序化的；然而它却执行着同样的功能：将被选中的人从世俗大众中分离出来，而“常人国度”的统治则逐渐腐烂为我们欲望机器的超真实。

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