Text page
white magic
"white magic" treats life, information, or swarming propagation as contagious process rather than bounded organism or stable message.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The basic claim is that control no longer operates only by prohibition or discipline. Viral spread, bacterial sex, and contagion provide a better model for how signals, bodies, and systems mutate across boundaries.
These texts work by tying information transfer to life processes that do not respect stable species, subjects, or enclosures. Virotechnics makes propagation into the central operation.
That matters because the section is trying to surface a picture of thought as contagious pattern rather than settled doctrine. Control becomes inseparable from what leaks, spreads, and mutates.
How to read this text
Read for the language of transmission and infection first. That vocabulary is the shortest route into the page's main claim.
Notice where life and information stop looking separate. That crossover is where the section's most distinctive thinking begins.
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). Sorcery is a tactics of fleeing, of communicability and propagation.
Definition · paragraph 2
Sorcery 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? Confinement magic is fundamentally concerned with protection, but it is not necessarily an art of caution.
Definition · paragraph 12
If there is such an overvaluation of one's own mental processes (to the point of exporting this theory, as we have done with our morality and techniques, to the core of every culture), then it is Freud's overvaluation, along with our whole psychologistic culture. (SED 143) Baudrillard's very hatred of Xorcery means that he remains complicit with White Magic, over-emphasising its powers of capture.
Mechanism · paragraph 10
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).
Style · paragraph 8
Give 'em enough rope.' SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY. Both Baudrillard and Burroughs recognize that Cybercapital has upgraded social control from Taylorist robozombification into long lead liberal automonitoring junkie-vampirization, capturing, formatting and inducing desire into programmable loo
Appears in sections
Control, Virotechnics, and Swarm Systems Primary section
Control processes, viral language, swarms, and abstract dynamics as a media-theoretical cluster.