Some Notes on BAP and Sade

For a while now I’ve been wanting to write about the connections I see between Bronze Age Mindset (as well as Harassment Architecture) and Marquis de Sade. To properly do this sort of work would require more time than I have at the moment, but I thought I could begin to compile some notes on some of the very basic connections that stood out to me between BAP and Sade during my (relatively quick) read of Bronze Age Mindset.

Perhaps what stood out most when reading Bronze Age Mindset were the various passages dealing with nature. Nature holds a central place in BAP’s “exhortation” (this choice to call what’s put forward in Bronze Age Mindset an exhortation instead of philosophy is itself an interesting one that warrants further consideration) (4). At various points in part one of his book, BAP writes about “the secret language of nature” (25). BAP’s treatment of nature was one of the components that most brought to mind for me Marquis de Sade’s libertines from Philosophy in the Bedroom. Consider, for instance, the following passage from BAP:

Hormones hold the key to the meaning of life in the most fundamental way, and if this sounds ‘reductionist’ to you, if you think I demystify things too much, it’s because you think you know what you don’t, or you think scientists know, when they actually don’t. These substances, seen with fresh eyes, are pure Big Magic. They govern all cycles of an organism’s growth and its decay. (28; my emphasis)

The emphasis placed upon hormones is part and parcel of BAP’s work, but what’s most interesting about this passage to me is the need to see these substances with fresh eyes. This passage raised several questions for me: if these substances are the key to the meaning of life, why do they need to be seen with fresh eyes? Are (mere) eyes themselves not sufficient? And what is it that makes eyes fresh such that they can (finally) apprehend the meaning of the substances? This is all to ask: what exactly is the relationship between meaning and substance? Are these substances in and of themselves not enough? It would seem that, by BAP’s own account, these substances need a supplement of sorts; the substances, that is, don’t quite speak for themselves. 

BAP further describes these substances on the next page in the following way:

The study of life as a ‘black box’ has led to misunderstanding because the observers are dishonest and stupid and will report an action, but not what comes before or after, nor its place in the life of an animal, nor do they try to intuit from within themselves: the study of hormones, among many other internal processes of an organism, will prevent them from lying this way. For example, an animal may act one way under stress and pressure, but then appear to do the same action out of a spirit of openness and self-increase, and the same action or behavior may actually have completely different meanings biologically: this will be shown by actions of hormones, neurotransmitters, cytokines in the body. And I will tell you what they likely [sic] to discover! So far only Ray Peat, a man blessed by a grand and alien understanding, has tried to decipher the secret language of these blessed substances. (29; my emphasis)

I hear echoes of Sade particularly in the later part of this passage. First, BAP’s account of substances as “blessed” recalls the libertine’s description of nature as “divine” (237). For both BAP and Sade, nature assumes something of a godlike role. Second, BAP’s description of these substances as having a “secret language” brings to mind Sade’s libertines who “listen only to nature’s voice” and see their role as the blind instruments of nature (a role that falls neatly into BAP’s stated mission in Bronze Age Mindset: “I want to give encouragement to so who are a certain way, in their blood, and to encourage them to become the purifying hand of nature” [130; emphasis in original]) (316). More, as something that speaks (often, ironically enough, with the voice of reason) to Sade’s libertines, nature could be said to be something alien to the libertines—much like Ray Peat’s understanding is according to BAP. But the way in which this understanding is alien suggests an apparent disjunction between the substances, on the one hand, and what it takes to understand these substances, on the other hand, which is to say, again, that the substances alone aren’t quite enough. 

Yet the notion that the substances are themselves sufficient seems to be a central issue in Bronze Age Mindset. Take, for example, BAP’s dreams of being an object: “I’ve even had dreams that I was a door or a vase, free to observe—I imagine only the seeing, the satisfaction of curiosity, and not the thousands of cares that must affect these people who I want to inhabit” (23; my emphasis). BAP dreams of pure, unmediated sight (or, perhaps, of sight as pure substance). Notably, too, this immediacy is tied by BAP to satisfaction. To my mind, BAP’s dream of pure seeing—of uninhibited sight—is remarkably similar to Sade’s libertines’ desire for pure, unobstructed pleasure. Of course, Sade’s libertines run into a fundamental problem in their pursuit of unobstructed pleasure: the libertine’s victim must remain beautiful in order to be tortured, and it is this beauty itself that further drives the libertine. So, in Sade, the relationship between the libertine and the victim is one in which the sadist pursues unobstructed pleasure through the total annihilation (or the transcendental negation, as Blanchot puts it somewhere) of the victim, but the pursuit of this total annihilation of the victim is motivated by beauty. Beauty for the libertine is thus a constitutive limit that simultaneously gets in the way and is a condition of possibility. Something similar seems to be at play in BAP’s dream of being an object insofar as it’s only to the extent that one can’t be an object (or can’t purely see) that one can posit the possibility of being an object (or of purely seeing). And in this regard BAP’s reflections on a future when unmediated sight can be achieved is especially fascinating:

If we had very advanced sensors where we could observe the inside of animals from far and in great detail, without interfering, without them feeling irritated or oppressed by our impositions, we could learn much about what life means. From observing many different ones in different places we could see what conditions an animal seeks in life in general. Such sensors would need to be much more advanced than equipment we have now, and to show what parts of the brain are activated, to see the relationship of this to blood pressure and heart rate, the actions of the immune system, the level of various hormones on the body’s systems, on the brain, and how these correlate to what the animal is doing at any one time. Any information we have right now on this subject is at most rudimentary. (27; my emphasis)

What is a sensor that observes without interference? The dream here seems to be of sensors that aren’t sensors. 

*My citations from Sade are from The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and other writings, translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse and published by Grove Press Inc. (1965)