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CCRU- WHITE MAGIC
A compact distinction between confinement and flight, turning white magic into a politics of limits and its opposite into propagation and escape.
Archive condition
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Core idea
White Magic defines one kind of magic as the policing of boundaries and another as propagation across them. The text is really about competing logics of control, communication, and movement rather than occult taxonomy for its own sake.
It stages the distinction through named demons, Deleuze's line of flight, and Gibson's matrix lore. The result is a compressed vocabulary for thinking containment versus transmissive escape.
This is one of the clearest Warwick-era examples of the archive using occult language to describe media dynamics and social coding. It matters because it condenses a politics of enclosure and flight into a small, highly quotable fragment.
How to read this text
Read the Sarkon and Deleuze passages together. The key move is the conversion of magic from superstition into a language for limits, contagion, and mobility.
Track the opposition between confinement and communicability. Almost everything in the piece hangs on that split.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
Sarkon: What you would call white magic is a program of confinement: it operates by marking boundaries, setting limits, stopping things from happening (and also, making things happen; it has a natural affinity with a certain Creationism). The other kind of magic is a tactics of fleeing, of communicability and propagation. Instead of asking, how do we keep things out? it asks, how can we take flight?
Definition · paragraph 2
Sarkon: What you would call white magic is a program of confinement: it operates by marking boundaries, setting limits, stopping things from happening (and also, making things happen; it has a natural affinity with a certain Creationism).
Definition · paragraph 2
The other kind of magic is a tactics of fleeing, of communicability and propagation. Instead of asking, how do we keep things out? it asks, how can we take flight?
Definition · paragraph 59
Yet this process itself makes prophecy moot, precisely because it makes any effective delineation of causal determination impossible: "the whole traditional world of causality" with its "distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the ends and the means" (SS 31) has been superceded by a logic of "code." White magical capture : to be in the system is already to be processed by it.
Mechanism · paragraph 71
White magic Xorcery operates by organizing words into language, installing new (micro and macro) pseudosignifying regimes in the heart of capitalism’s "profoundly illiterate" (AO 240) sub-Culture, and spreading Fuzz (by ex-communicating everything that connects).
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.