federico campagna

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Antonio Menchen, colección, 2008–ongoing

interview

by OLIVIER ZAHM and ALEPH MOLINARI

portraits by BRIGITA ZIZYTÉ and MARKN

artwork by ANTONIO MENCHEN

 

He is one of the rare young philosophers to explore the world of magic — a topic often dismissed in philosophy. In his remarkable book “technic and magic,” he rehabilitates magic as a legitimate approach to reality. His concept of the ineffable defies the total dominance of language.

 

OLIVIER ZAHM — How do you explain this long and systematic repression of magic and magical traditions by the forces of rationality?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Well, magic is a very large field, and there are many aspects to it. Some aspects have not been persecuted but developed. There is a technical part of magic, called mechanical magic, which means performing a series of actions that have immediate results mechanically. This idea has been developed as part of technology and science. So, it hasn’t been persecuted but transferred to a scientific outlook. Certain traditions of magic — having to do with the traditionally feminine world, for example — have often been considered second-grade, if not superstition or useless, on account of their provenance. Similar types of magical actions from Indigenous groups have also been sidelined, not because of the method but because of the provenance. The method of mechanical magic producing results through certain actions has become technological, but magic is something more than that. There is another type of magic that has been not developed but suppressed. This other type of magic proposes the idea that the world is not made up of only one dimension or one plane where everything exists on the same level. Instead, it is made up of many different dimensions, which all exist at the same time but on completely different levels. Magic in this
field is the attempt to establish communication between different dimensions. This idea has been completely denied because we have an outlook in the modern world — maybe now a little bit less, but until now for sure — that reality is made only of one layer and that there is one mode of existence.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Does magic presuppose different layers of reality?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Today, everything exists in the same dimension. There is no transcendence or “subcendence,” if you wish. Everything is on a level that is capturable by language. Anything that can be detected, measured, described, or ascribed to an identity or a particular category exists on one level. Anything that is not within this catchment area does not exist. Magic says it does exist, and we can create communications with it.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, you mean magic is not a language?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — No, it’s a form of language that tests its own limits.

OLIVIER ZAHM — That’s a beautiful thing to say — that the world is made of multiple dimensions. How would you define magic?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Magic is a way of looking at reality that has
different presuppositions, different axioms, different basic ideas about how reality is constructed. Magic is a method based on these ideas. What I call technic suggests that when we look at any object, there is one layer of the object, which is what we can say about it, what we can see, what we can conceptualize, measure, identify, and so on and so forth. Then there is another level within the same object, the same moment of time, that is entirely beyond it. This other level is not simply the level of God — a divinity that once again can be conceptualized, nominated, that gives a law — but is something else entirely. And with this realm of other forces, we cannot have a mechanical relationship. We cannot produce effects; we cannot create an engineering relationship with it; we cannot create technology with it, but we have to create channels of communication somehow.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, we cannot control these forces, and we cannot instrumentalize this reality.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Absolutely. And that applies to ourselves from this magical perspective. Looking at ourselves, we see one layer in which I am Federico, a white-ish Mediterranean guy from Sicily. I can have a molecular composition, a certain bank account, a certain nationality, and so on and so forth. That’s one level of what I am, and when you ask me who I am, I usually answer on that level. But there is more than that in me. The very fact that I exist and that I am aware opens another dimension within myself. My pure existence, the fact that I exist, is conceptually inexplicable. Pure existence is beyond the range of ontology, and the fact that I am aware is an abyss in myself. I cannot contemplate my own being aware, even if I am a Buddhist saint. Actually, if I do, I will become enlightened, and that also would open an abyss in me. Now, I have to take account of the fact that when I walk around and live my life, I am at the same time Federico, the guy with the molecular composition, and these two abysses over which I don’t have any control but which I am. Fundamentally, the one that responds to your question, “Who are you?” with “Federico” is not Federico. It’s that other voice that is doing the job of speaking and thinking for me, and yet is incomprehensible to me. This is not even psychology — this is metaphysics.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, in a way, magic in your point of view opens an abyss, a vertigo or a cliff, breaking this obsession with identity.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Absolutely. And it changes everything. Of course, taking this perspective, when you look at another person, you realize that you’re looking at the same time at an identity — somebody who can be identified or classified — and at an infinite abyss, which is the same that you have in yourself, or that there is in an animal. Now, if we’re thinking in terms of policies, we often have policies in society that are structured on the basis of classifications. Certain people with certain documents or with certain identity traits “deserve” a certain treatment on the basis of what we can say about them. But if we consider that they’re not just what we can say about them, that they are much more, then we have to rethink how we treat them. We are not treating them as a piece of language. We should treat them as something else. You can keep a piece of language away from a border, but you cannot keep out an infinite abyss, which is made of the same infinite ineffable structure as the whole of reality.

OLIVIER ZAHM — This explains the fear of the immigrant. For example, when you see men come up to the cars on the highway outside of Paris asking for money… They come from Central Africa, they’ve been through war, they’ve crossed the sea on boats, and they end up on the edge of a highway with no identity, and this scares people.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — But we have organized the whole of our society on the basis of these classifications, and whoever falls in the wrong classification is in a bad place, like a lot of these migrants who have no documents and belong to nothing. In the United Kingdom, they called them “citizens of nowhere,” as if it were a bad thing. In the Middle Ages, a “citizen of nowhere” was a saint. By the way, Hugh of Saint Victor was French. He used to call the saints that. But people who fall out of these categories disappear while remaining alive. So, they are extinct while they’re still alive, and you can see how they exist. Of course, the Palestinians are another example of this.

OLIVIER ZAHM — We are trapped in a world of technological control. Can you explain why you see an opposition between magic and technic? Is it about the possibility of controlling reality, or is it a different system of interpreting reality?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — I use the word technic instead of “technology” to try to avoid the confusion. I am not against technology. If I were against technology, I would be against writing as well because everything is a technology. Gilbert Simondon clearly discussed the idea of technology as the way in which individuals relate to one another — the layer of relation between things. So, I’m not against technology, of course. I called it “technic,” which is a particular way of looking at the world that reduces everything to what can be said about that thing in terms of language. Technic is a way of transforming reality into a list of linguistic units and recomposing them as if that were reality. There is nothing inherently wrong with the technology we have today, but it does have some problems because every technology, as you were saying earlier, is based on previous ideas that are the basis for our activities — including sex or cooking. We make technology today starting from the idea that everything can be reduced to classifications and identities. For example, we make big investments in Big Data, and there is nothing wrong with the machines that make Big Data, but the idea that the world can be translated into data is a dangerous metaphysical mistake, I think.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But it’s the logical extension of this technic way of approaching the world because, if you start from the printing system, it’s already constructing
the world with data, and it goes on to artificial intelligence. It seems that it’s a constant evolution toward more data or more possibilities of transforming reality into a data system.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — You are completely correct. And this is an exercise I invite my students to do all the time — to deduce from a type of technology the idea of reality that’s behind it. You can look at a certain type of institution. Institutions are also technologies, and from the way they’re designed and structured, you can deduce what kind of idea of reality the makers had. The drum of a Siberian shaman, although it’s very similar to the drum of a contemporary jazz drummer, comes from a completely different idea of the world. And you can tell by the way it is made.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Even music, then.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Of course, absolutely. Every human creation has behind it some basic axioms; even the most complex or the smallest insignificant object has behind it a particular approach. But we can have many different approaches to reality.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And how is the world constructed by language or by technic different from the world constructed through a perspective of magic? How would you describe this opposition?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — I think it can be described as two different games. Every game is constructed on the basis of some basic ideas. What is the space? What is the aim of the game? Who are the players? Once you have decided on these basic things, then you have a certain type of game that comes up. Technic and magic are two different games because they understand reality in different ways, and so they create different worlds. The difference between these two games has to do with who is the protagonist of the game. So, what are the little pieces we move around in the world of technic?

OLIVIER ZAHM — Interesting. In the world of technic, you only have two kinds of protagonists — the scientist or the philosopher or the musician, and the world and reality.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — In the world of technic, you only have one protagonist, which is units of language. Reality is made entirely of units of language that can be recombined infinitely.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And that potentially can be shared with everyone.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Yes, but there is no “everyone,” in a way, because each of us is only a long string of units of language. You are simply the string of all the things that I can say about you.

OLIVIER ZAHM — I’m just a Wikipedia page. [Laughs]

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Yes, that and your bank account and your passport and your consumer preferences and your medical exams, and so on and so forth. In magic, the idea is that the protagonist is a very small kernel, a very small glimmer of the ineffable. So, beyond understanding existence coded by a filter of language, the protagonist is entirely different. Everything that exists is at the same time infinite and eternal — so, beyond space and time, beyond the concept of existence itself, and present in a multiplicity of forms. It is not defined by the way it presents itself because its essence is beyond definition. Now, you see how that opens up a completely different game. Let’s think, for example, of the way in which you can understand your own relationship with yourself in terms of mortality. This perspective sees you or me or any object as existing inside the flow of time in a way that can be measured and counted and observed. But the pure existence that makes us be — that fact of being, which is what holds us up — is outside of time. So, you are at the same time eternal and temporal. You can think of your own death in a completely different way. Mortality affects the temporal part but not the eternal part, which is not the soul; the soul is a different concept that belongs to a particular tradition. It’s the eternity of being, of the being that you are.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, this is your concept of the ineffable, which means beyond language. It applies to yourself and to everything — to animals, even cigarettes… [Laughs]

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Yes, to this moment in time, to this moment of our exchange. Anything that exists for the very fact of existing is eternal. As Parmenides used to warn many centuries ago and Emanuele Severino repeated a few decades ago, anything that is cannot not be. Existence is eternal in its being, and to that extent anything that is part of existence is eternal. If this moment exists, if this exchange exists, it is eternal.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And does it connect with the new scientific idea of energetic fields, where everything is connected through a subatomic dimension, where particles have no weight — they’re not vibration or a mass but a sort of common background? There is some new scientific research about this idea that there’s a common energetic field beyond mass and vibration.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — No, it’s not directly related to this.

ALEPH MOLINARI — But what about quantum physics, which posits that there are multiple realities? That pertains to the realm of technic, which in some ways speaks about the possibilities of different dimensions of existence and different states of matter, going into dark matter. So, where do these two intersect?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Quantum physics, of course, is a development of science after a great moment of crisis with the understanding of the incompleteness of any scientific theory. There was a moment in the history of science, in the early mid-20th century, when science became very conscious of its own limitations. Quantum theory embraced the idea that there is an element of fuzziness, so to say, in what we can comprehend about reality. But this notion I’m suggesting of the ineffable is far older than that, and it’s something we return to over and over again. You find it in mystical literature the world over, from China to Ireland and beyond, because it’s one of those things that is self-evident to a certain extent. We have a self-evidence in two aspects. The first is that we are aware we have a limited mind, so our ability to perceive cognitively but also sensorially is limited, and we know it. And then we start thinking that if our mind is limited and our perceptions are limited, then the world we see is limited. No matter how much technology we create, it will still be limited. Do we believe, then, that reality was built by some very benevolent God precisely to coincide with our limits? Or do we deduce that our limits do not define the ontology of the universe? The ontology of the universe is far beyond what we can ever comprehend and conceptualize. Now, this is a very humble and minimal philosophical statement, and it’s been said over and over again, but that’s the foundation of what magic is.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Because even a dog can smell hundreds of times better than we can, and that’s enough to understand that our world is quite limited. Maybe the dog can perceive some reality that seems magical to us but is totally normal for them.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Magic basically says that what we know is not all there is, and we will never know all there is, and the largest part of reality will remain forever ineffable to us.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, if we imagine a super AI language model developed to that point, if I follow you, then even this mega intelligence will still be the product of our mind — so, it will never embrace this multidimensional reality or the infinite.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Every point of observation is limited by being a point of observation. So, even if we were able to create a mega-mind from the minds of all the mushrooms, all the plankton, all the animals, humans, and machines from every planet we know of in the solar system, it would still be limited. We have to recognize that the truth — things as they are — is beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend, and thus, whatever we say and capture within definitions and language cannot be taken as reality. We must always take it as a very limited, partial, fictional, arbitrary selection, which we recompose narratively. We have to decide to what extent we have to trust this.

OLIVIER ZAHM — We need this system of interpretation, and we instrumentalize it.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — We need it because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to live. I mean, if we were overwhelmed by the contemplation of infinite chaos, we would be like mystics. Mystics are the greatest scientists in this regard. But it’s very difficult to build a life like that. So, we need to have this simplification and believe it to a certain extent, which is the real challenge. And remind ourselves constantly it is fiction. Every world is a fiction. This room you’re looking around at right now is fiction.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Or a form of simulation.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But this reality system is our interpretation of the world. The fictions we create for ourselves as humans versus the planet or nature are also destructive. That’s the paradox. So, where are we going? Do we need magic to escape this dead end?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Absolutely. For example, if you look at a forest or an ecosystem, and you treat it only as the sum of all its linguistic units, of all its definitions and classifications, then you will be forever bound to treat it as such. And the impact we have had in this way has been totally destructive. We have to be able to look at things in a completely different way, with a different understanding of the essence of each object, which is not just resources. It is much more than that, and this demands a different type of negotiation. If I have in me an infinite ineffability, so does a tree. Once again, this is not the soul. The soul is a different concept. And so, we have to enter a new layer of negotiation and solidarity because we recognize that we are made of the same thing. So, is what I’m suggesting closer to reality than that? Not necessarily. But it has different consequences. It creates a different world, one where we create different possibilities and a better life. This is the real challenge in metaphysics — not to find the truth, which will forever escape us, but to create a world where we can live a dignified life.

ALEPH MOLINARI — So, based on this perspective, the more we participate in magic and this more profound sense of being, the more it will feed into the technic and create new modes of existence?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Definitely. It produces new worlds. The passages between world forms are always gradual, and they have happened many times before. I’m suggesting embracing a different idea of reality because, in the past, the human species has gone through different ideas of reality. We have
changed them substantially. And what changes? Every time you switch the fundamental axioms about how reality is composed, you have a general revolution in the way in which the world is fundamentally inhabited. The social structures are engineered, and also the way in which the world appears. The way in which the world appears to a Siberian or Amazonian shaman, or to an ancient Greek or a medieval peasant in France in the 12th century or to us today — is not
the same. In that sense, the world presents itself to each of these people as being physically different. Reality appears to you on the basis of your setting. If you change your setting, you have a different experience of reality.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Speaking of shamans, many Indigenous tribes use sacred psychoactive plants to access other realms of reality or dream states. Do you think psychedelics can transform our understanding of reality and help create new worlds?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Psychedelics can be useful because they can give a shortcut to rewiring our way of making worlds. But the problem is they are temporary and vanish very quickly. To sustain a different idea of reality, you have to go through a long process. So, it’s a false spring, a false dawn, in a way.

ALEPH MOLINARI — But it gives you a glimpse, a little moment of understanding, that this reality system can be different and that we can connect with the world in a different way.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Absolutely, but it is not enough. You have to create a way to sustain this state. Only social institutions are memory machines for world-building. Every social institution teaches you and reminds you that reality is made in a certain way.

OLIVIER ZAHM — We could create new institutions, then.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — That’s the most effective way of remembering. If we create different social institutions based on different principles, then we have this act of remembrance much faster.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And being in the academic institution, part of the Royal Academy Schools in London, you could initiate a revolution.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — I’m not the institution, unfortunately. I’m just an employee. [Laughs] The institution of the university is not built on the basis of a different idea of reality. It’s often built on the basis that knowledge equals certification. And once again, you’re back in the same old realm.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Maybe we need a ministry of magic. [Laughs]

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — Exactly!

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do you think the art world is a refuge for magic?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — To my understanding, artists at the moment are really trying to present and inhabit alternative realities. They’re trying to act as if the world were already completely different, inhabiting a different
perspective.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Artists, generally speaking, try to find an exit from this technic system that you are describing. Do you think magic can be expressed in art today?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — The art world has the ability to present sandboxes, to give some sort of demo version of things, to make people realize that certain things are possible, which is very important. Showing that certain things are possible is really the beginning but cannot be achieved within the art world. The art world is like a finger that points to a direction. Then you have to walk outside the art world. And this is something from the other end — education, for example, and the restructuring of political institutions.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And what about fashion and magic?

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA — We’re saying that an artwork is a finger pointing somewhere. It gives the idea that something is possible. To me fashion does that much more than contemporary art. I don’t know how fashion brands could communicate the sacredness and eternity of each being [laughs], but I’m sure they will find a way… But imagine that — it would be such powerful communication. It would change everything.

END