Project Description:
I’d like us to define something of a sigma function and a refractory principle that will sum the number of individuals in a group projecting their attention (normalized to a unit of measure per individual) on to a single totemic object, imbuing that object with collective, aggregate, attention—with mana; and to describe the nature of that object’s (the totem) attention-refractory properties back ‘into’ each individual participating collectively in its observance. Émile Durkheim, sociologist, posits in his work “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” principles of particular interest that are involved in the totemic relationship between ‘believers’ (those who collectively project their attention onto a religious totem) and the totemic object (or person). He argues that the most parsimonious and thereby the ‘founding feature’ of all religion is “the totemic principle.” This principle, as his work describes it, is called “mana.” Mana is also often spelled “manna,” and called by other cultures things like prana, vril, orgone—and, I believe, this function is deeply described in Freud’s work, but not attributed to this principle by him as, libidinal energy. Below are my clarifications of and modifications to Durkheim’s principles, briefly (that is, incompletely) outlined in order to describe us a starting point for discussion:
1) Mana is infinitely divisible and relatively lossless in its transmission. The entropic nature of it, we should explicate as well. That is, a totem, with the collective projections of attention that inhere in it can be sub-divided physically, and to each sub-object or fractal of the original will inhere the entirety of the original totemic object. This is something like the Christian cross’ representative power—symbolically holy regardless of context, and transferable to religious relics that conscious beings —beings of attention, mana— use to represent the principle (rather than the original object itself). Similarly, Elvis’ guitar is ‘just a guitar’ but to the representative species, man, the mana remains ‘in,’ ‘on,’ or ‘with’ the object(s) (Cf. point 3 below re: contagion). In both examples, a representation of the original cross, or just a string from the guitar somehow contain this mana (nevermind the ‘how’ for the moment). We, the narrative and representative species, the storytellers, mankind treat totemic objects functionally as if this principle were true—we revere the guitar on the condition that others revere it.
2) Mana increases with each additional payment of attention or ‘casting of an individuals conscious attention’ upon the totem by its totemites. This is something like a re-cognition (a re-affirming, re-presenting to our consciousness) by the individual with his own attention (this is the idea of the ‘amen’ in a congregation [con: with, gregation: gregarious gathering—this has implications of “effervescence,” a term Durkheim is (agnostically) implicitly insistent upon as an ‘overflowing’] of the aggregate mana of the group which inheres in the object of their collective attention—and in the participants themselves when in the context of the gathering. Mana thereby also decreases in degree relative to the size of the group of totemites, though it persists through time as a hyperobject. I use the term hyperobject as kin to the concept of the ‘Idea’ itself being an abstract immaterial ‘[hyper]object’ that is relatively atemporal (so long as it is represented in by conscious beings—a material substrate to consciousness: hence the ‘relative’ lossless transmission is relative to material representation via the totem).
3) Mana is contagious. Amidst a crowd projecting attention onto a single totemic representation, effervescence amidst the crowd is the result, and this feeling is automatically ‘constructed’ vís-a-vís the gathered presence of the crowd —a crowd of cognitive beings— itself: by the individual and collective functions of cognition itself, in the context of a crowd. These effects, inherent to human consciousness, the unique experience of Dasein, ‘being’ work, preservationally for the cognitive species, to translate and reconcile the mental to the physical, and vice versa: this is—something like John Vervaeke’s concept of transjection, which is teleologically relative to the subjectivity of an embodied consciousness—again, the human being. I argue that this is the nature of the meta-hyperobject, the cognate;
-- And, to announce my intentions so that you may avoid academic entanglement you might find distasteful, my book, that our work will hopefully inform, is an effort to describe what we call "God" as a catch-all word for this very function, the meta-probability that is the function of the cognate, and which is the nature of divination (ie. gambling, non-determinant chance in the universe)—but that is outside of our scope here, and I only mean to convey that 'meaning,' which is what is derived from the congregation of subjective consciousnesses, is what is on the other side of the triangular relationship between matter (on one side), the idea / translation factor (at top), and man's teleological orientation (the other side): that is, the function of the cognate is to make functional meaning from consciousness' material experience—to tell stories about objects as a means of survival, which is unique to the species who does indeed operate in this way—even a scientific hypothesis is a 'potential story'. To belabor the point a bit: the point of positing man's idea of 'god' as cognate, is to imbue matter with functional meaning that we may manipulate matter, first via the story, the idea that can die in place of our automatic instinct-only impulse, and then by our own hand once our hypotheses are confirmed (which I argue is a function of the dialogue, the word-mediated ideal law—the logos). Hence the saying "man lives not by bread [objects] alone [but by mana—the meaning he attributes to his experience]". --
An individual in possession of consciousness, who therefor functions vís-a-vís this cognitive process, is subject to the external, material gathering—the masses, the mass, mass formation, and his cognition simply performs its function, which in the context of the crowd is to attend to the focus of the group’s attention—the totem, and thereby to participate (Cf. Erich Neumann’s ‘participation mystique’ in his “The Origins and History of Consciousness”) “mystically,” that is, to attentively participate in the conscious representations of the collective—the projection of their collective attention upon the totem. Thus, participation is as ‘contagious’ as the individual’s inherent orientation toward the group’s collectively directed attention. Imagine attending a concert and not having any orientation toward the stage at which the crowd’s entire attention is focused. This is somewhat, if not fully involuntary. The alternative to ignoring the totem and the collective’s representation —including in the context of modernity— is ostracization; religiously speaking, non-observance of god begets exile / scapegoating (a lá Girard). To the degree that social norms (like attending to that which others are attending to) is enforced socially, mana is also obligatory. Thus, mana functions something like contagion—not solely trough social enforcement, but by the very nature of the human response in the context of a social mass’ attention being cast upon a totemic representation. The sociological experiment that most rudimentarily proves this is the lone individual staring at a rooftop: soon another will instinctively join him in his gaze upward—even if he is gazing at nothing. Meaning seeking is happening.
Synopsis:
The aim of our discussions should be to mathematically understand and attempt to state the refractory and multiplicative/permutative principle at play, with a specific focus on defining a ‘unit of attention’ in the abstract, and the concept of the aggregate total attention cast upon the totem being losslessly transjected (introjected) back into and ‘received’ by each totemite/individual (based on the infinite divisibility / ‘part is equal to the whole’ principle mentioned above). Of note, I believe this is what underlies mass formation, which has implications adjacent to Mattias Desmet’s increasingly popular work re: atomization, totalitarianism, and the religious instinct in general. I hope you find this interesting, and I’d be flattered to work with you. Thank you for your time and…attention.