shut up i'm manifesting

the homeopathic magic of posting, reviewing, & commenting

Richard Thompson, Cul de Sac (January 10, 2010)

Examining forms of speech acts in his sometimes celebrated and sometimes vilified Verbal Behavior (1957), BF Skinner theorizes about how people come to make spoken requests and demands of the inanimate, and terms such verbal events superstitious and magical “mands:”¹

There are mands which cannot be explained by arguing that responses of the same form have been reinforced under similar circumstances. The dice player exclaims Come seven!, for example, even though he has not asked for and got sevens anywhere. Accidental reinforcement of the response appears to be the explanation. The experimental study of nonverbal behavior has shown that merely intermittent reinforcement, such as that provided by chance throws of seven, is sufficient to maintain a response in strength. The player…retains the response in some strength and continues to utter it, either whimsically or seriously under sufficient stress, because of its occasional “consequences.” Mands which specify the behavior of inanimate objects often receive some reinforcement in this sense. The response Blow, blow, thou winter wind, for example, is usually uttered when the wind is already blowing, and the correlation between behavior and effect, though spurious, may work a change in operant strength…

The special relation between response and consequence exemplified by the mand establishes a general pattern of control over the environment. In moments of sufficient stress, the speaker simply describes the reinforcement appropriate to a given state of deprivation or aversive stimulation. The response must, of course, already be part of his verbal repertoire as some other type of verbal operant…

This sort of extended operant may be called a magical mand. It does not exhaust the field of verbal magic, but it is the commonest example. Flushed with our success under favorable reinforcing circumstances, we set out to change the world without benefit of listener. Unable to imagine how the universe could have been created out of nothing, we conjecture that it was done with a verbal response. It was only necessary to say, with sufficient authority, Let there be light!

(Bolds mine, of course.)

Superstitious and magical thinking come naturally to an animal uniquely endowed for relational behavior. We cannot reckon how many times and in how many places across prehistory some person (or proto-person) said something like “I hope rain stop soon” or “I wish Grog dead,” and was then astonished when the storm clouds obligingly parted, or when word arrived of Grog’s fatal goring by a woolly mammoth. Given how obviously speech makes things happen in a human milieu, it would have been difficult for our ancestors to abstain from reasoning by induction and determining that pleas, requests, and demands addressed to an absent listener, or to an unseen nonhuman listener, or to the world at large might likewise bring about a desired outcome. Magic and ritual were the prescientific methodization of wielding that power, and constituted the ground on which culture (emphasis on the first syllable) was first erected.

It is not difficult to find preserved and live specimens of systematized magical speech. Egyptologist Robert Ritner gives an example of an ancient spell against food poisoning:

O Sakhmet of yesterday, Wadjet of today, you have come and replenished this table of [NAME], just as you did for your father Re, when you came forth from the cult city of Pe. Protect [NAME] with that papyrus wand of life which is in your hand, in that name of yours of Wadjet. Shoot your arrow against all the food of him who shall speak against [NAME] by means of any evil matters. Let a slaughter be made of them like that time when you overpowered the enemies of Re in the primordial age in that name of yours of Sakhmet…

In an article for Scroll, one Vikram Zutshi gives readers an introduction to the Uḍḍ corpus, speaks to an expert who characterizes Hinduism’s idea of magic as a set of “rules-based” operations for altering reality, and provides a translation of a spell from the Uddisa Tantra:

Oṃ! O glorious Goddess of the Wet Cloth (ārdrapaṭeśvarī), O She Who is Garbed in Green and Blue, O Dark One, O Salivator, O Fierce One, Howler, Skull-Bearer, Flaming Mouth, Seven Tongues of Flame, the Thousand-eyed One, approach! Approach [NAME]! I offer you an animal! Cut off the life of [NAME]! Approach! Approach! You Who Steal Away Lives! Huṃ phaṭ bhur bhuvaḥ svaḥ phaṭ! You that devours cloth soaked in blood, cleave my enemies! Cleave! Drink the blood! Drink! huṃ phaṭ svāhā.

A blog post from the British Library examines a sixteenth-century Hebrew spell codex called the The Tree of Knowledge. The first entry of the first section instructs the reader in making an amulet for curing fever:

Av avr avra avrak avraka avrakal avrakala avrakal avraka avrak avra avr av—“The people cried out to Moses. Moses prayed to the LORD, and the fire died down.”…

In a chapter of Conflict in Africa: Concepts and Realities (1976), one Adda Bozeman expounds on the power of words in [a dubiously undifferentiated] Africa:²

Words have the power to wound and to heal in all language communities, literate and nonliterate. But in Africa’s oral culture, in which mythical thinking prevails, and in which speech is essentially behavioral, words have the power to kill, even as they have the power to placate forces of aggression or set aside disputes. In either case they are viewed as tantamount to action...provided they are uttered in conjunction with symbols and rituals that have been evolved in the service of the same purpose.

In the category of specially weighted, magically aggressive verbal formulations, none is as feared and trusted as the oath and the curse...[T]hese formulae may, in fact, induce death or injury by virtue either of the sheer fear they instill or of the human actions they are designed to set in motion. Oathing and cursing, then, being intrinsic aspects of participatory magic, may be said to provide ultimate sanctions by means of which human behavior is being controlled, whether in the context of the family, the age group, the tribe...

Last week, The Hill reported on Donald Trump’s attempt to cast a spell in response to Kamala Harris’ appearance on The View:

Asked by co-host Sunny Hostin whether she would have “done something differently from President Biden over the past four years, Harris responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Republicans, including Trump, seized on that answer.

On social media, Trump gloated that Harris “would have done nothing different than Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.”

Trump added: “The Lamestream Media doesn’t want to pick up the story, the dumb women on the show wish they never asked her the question that led to that Election Defying answer, but the Internet is going WILD.”

“Magick,” wrote Aleister Crowley in the early twentieth century, “is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” By Crowley’s definition, I should say Trump’s tweet does qualify as “magick.”

Trump was, after all, endeavoring to “speak” a change into effect, to nudge or recolor the state of reality into conformity with his will. Given the sensitivity of our attunement to the temperature, tenor, and tilt of the activity in the social hologram called the public sphere, the suggestion that an event has generated a large quantity of negative buzz can be sufficient to excite those who receive it into actualizing what has been suggested to them—not very much unlike the mechanism of the African curse, as described by Bozeman. Trump owes his success as a populist bugbear to his sharkishly instinctive understanding of this state of affairs.

Stolen from The Progressive

In the Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Marshall McLuhan argued that television was acculturating the youth of his day to a kind of thinking and behaving that less resembled the individualistic, linearly rational, and visually-oriented modality of prewar Western society to one which more resembled rural life in sub-Saharan Africa:

[A] child in any Western milieu is surrounded by an abstract explicit visual technology or uniform time and uniform continuous space in which “cause” is efficient and sequential, and things move and happen on single planes and in successive order. But the African child lives in the implicit, magical world of the resonant oral word. He encounters not efficient causes but formal causes of configurational field such as any non-literate society cultivates. [John C] Carothers repeats again and again that “rural Africans live largely in a world of sound—a world loaded with direct personal significance for the hearer—whereas the Western European lives much more in a visual world which is on the whole indifferent to him.”...

Carothers reviews the familiar nonliterate idea of the “power” of words where thought and behavior depend upon the magical resonance in words and their power to impose their assumptions relentlessly. He cites Kenyetta concerning love magic among the Kikuyu:

It is very important to acquire the correct use of magical words and their proper intonations, for the progress in applying magic effectively depends on uttering these words in their ritual order. ... In performing these acts of love magic the performer has to recite a magical formula. ... After this recitation he calls the name of the girl loudly and starts to address her as though she were listening.

It is a matter of “rite words in rote order,” as Joyce put it. But...any Western child today grows up in this kind of magical repetitive world as he hears advertisements on radio and TV.

Two years prior to the Gutenberg Galaxy’s publication, McLuhan pondered the relation between ads and myth in “Myth and Mass Media” (1959):

A kind of myth-making process is often associated with Hollywood and with Madison Avenue. So far as advertisements are concerned, they do, in intention at least, strive to comprise in a single image the total social action or process that is imagined as desirable. That is, an advertisement tries both to inform us about, and also to produce in us by anticipation, all the stages of a metamorphosis, private and social. So that whereas a myth might appear as the record of such extended metamorphosis, an advertisement proceeds by anticipation of change, simultaneously anticipating causes with effects and effects with causes.

By modern standards, the operation traced here is pitifully clunky. Taken with the benefit of hindsight, we see that McLuhan characterizes a period when electric media was comparatively slow and linear, in spite of his assertions to the contrary.

Radio and television ads scripted, recorded, and scheduled in advance could not speak knowingly to the present; they could not register and use audience feedback in real time; their success in triggering “metamorphoses” in the attitudes and behavior of an audience was difficult to gauge until some days or weeks after the fact. Crucially, their “magick” worked on a physically segmented audience whose members were walled off from each other in family-sized units which for the most part lacked the means to communicate their immediate reactions to people outside of their silos. In the case of television, which lacked an analogue to the palm-sized transistor radio, the times and the places in which a viewer could receive “content” were stiffly restricted. The distinctions between performer, broadcaster, and audience remained as absolute as those between author, publisher, and readers during print culture’s nineteenth-century apogee, as did the one-way flow of information from specially selected authors/performers to consumers.

I don’t suppose it needs to be explained why this is no longer the case.³

From the defunct Tumblr account of one “artist-derogatory”

Of all the changes effectuated through our transition from a heterogenous media landscape and its contingent habits of thought and action into the unified, instantaneous, interactive, and emotionally urgent universe of digital media, perhaps more attention ought to be paid to our renewed belief in magical cause-and-effect.⁴ A great deal of online discourse and behavior implicitly assumes of the reality of what James Frazier called “homeopathic magic” in The Golden Bough (1890), in which the practitioner “infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it.”⁵

“How many times in the past couple of years have you heard a friend say, ‘Manifest it’ or, ‘Speak it into existence’ when asking them for advice on accomplishing a life goal?” asked one Mara Santilli in 2022. “Or perhaps you’ve gone down a #Manifesting rabbit hole on TikTok (just me?).”

Her overview of manifesting, published in the digital pages of Self, appeared as one of the first thirty or forty results when I searched for the term; I chose to cite it because it’s about as good as any other article on the topic. There are hundreds, thousands.

Santilli cites (but does not show us) Google Trends stats indicating that searches for “manifestation” have been steadily on the rise, and points to the coincidence between the coronavirus lockdown of 2020 and the currency of “shut up, I’m manifesting” memes. In guessing at the reason for the upswing in interest, Sanielli opts for the obvious: the powerlessness and malaise many people felt throughout the Trump years peaked during the lockdowns, correspondingly heightening their interest in adopting more constructive and optimistic ways of thinking.

It doesn’t occur to her to wonder if our renascent belief in the power of the individual to alter reality by willing or speaking change into motion was an extrapolation from the dynamics of online “life.” We routinely witness clips, posts, and memes transmitting pulses of delight and horror across our externalized psychic landscape; we find that people treat us the way we’d like to be treated when we project to them the version of ourselves to which we aspire to identify with (and to be identified as); when we receive upvotes for sharing quips or clips, we somehow feel more real as agents in the world; virtual strangers typing criticisms or insults at us can sometimes seem catastrophic. If Carothers and McLuhan were correct in their assessment of the print-conditioned, introspective, and buttoned-up Westerner living in a world “on the whole indifferent to him,” the Like button, the Reply button, the Repost button, the Views ticker, all manner of recommendation and sorting algorithms, and the Notification pocketbuzz have since partially resituated us in a technological simulation of the empathetic and responsive oral field.

Evidently words can reacquire some of their lost power when type is virtualized for use in an interactive omnidirectional medium, and when the discursive blazes more brightly than the real. For someone spending over eight hours day (currently the American average) absorbing and participating in digital media, the most pressing events, the most relevant facts, and the most urgent voices are those that confront them through the social hologram. As Baudrillard famously put it, the grid or field of the virtual has become the map that engenders the territory—or, rather, we often find ourselves preeminently conscious of dwelling in the map rather than on terra firma.

This being the case, a lurid or shocking photograph traversing the warp and weft of the net doesn’t reveal new information about the world; the photograph changes our world. The disclosure of someone’s reprehensible behavior through a leaked email, a covert recording, or a tweeted denunciation transforms the accused into somebody else; an explanatory narrative which correlates facts received as narrative (how many people talking about eastern Ukraine lately have been to eastern Ukraine?) in contradiction to our preferred narrative is a thing to be abhorred, a thing akin to the paradox of two individual solid bodies occupying the same volume in space. Not only do the expression and the action rediscover their preliterate unity, but opinion assumes the function of a sort of environmental feature.⁶

Perhaps this was always somewhat the case—but in the desert of the real, our intercourse with the mirage assumes a new depth and a sharper focus (as it droughts more and more those parts of our world that aren’t of the device).

Recall and consider the following controversies:

• Are people justified in complaining about the economy of 2024, or have they been bamboozled into mistaking Bad Vibes for Bad Times?

• Where and how did the COVID-19 pandemic originate?

• Is Kamala Harris a talented and charismatic politician, and a viable presidential candidate?

• Was the Ghostbusters remake of 2016 a lousy movie, or was it a quality film sabotaged by a basket of basement-dwelling reactionary geeks and incels?

As Hans-Georg Moeller & Paul J. D’Ambrosio point out in You and Your Profile (2021), the agonistic back-and-forth (or oathing and cursing) of online “conversation” does not drive at the determination of any objective truth. The purpose, rather, is to confirm and validate perspectives, typically by dint of quantitative metrics. Scarcely do we learn about an event before the “general peer” casts judgement about it; the prevailing opinion inextricably merges with what an Enlightenment way of thinking might have deemed the “bare” or “neutral” facts. The judgement of the general peer, or the “hive” into which one has sorted oneself (or has been sorted into), acts as a feature of an overarching social and epistemological environment. There can be no such thing as objectivity when the “real” facts are never contacted directly, and when emotion and bias invariably tincture the information received.

We must all know by now that it’s impossible to convince somebody to reassess their beliefs by atting them and typing out insults and corrections, or by rebutting their video clip with your video clip. Rather, the goal is to be seen atting them, rebutting them, and calling them out, ideally as part of a small army of allies, fellow-travelers, and checkmarked doyens turning out in greater numbers than the opposition and wielding more formidable rhetorical (or sophistic) weaponry, thus instating our preferred narrative as a pseudo-objective social reality in a multitudinous effort of manifestation.⁷ It is as Crowley says: “the power of my thought may so work on the mind of another person as to produce far-reaching physical changes in him, or in others through him.”

Outrage over practices of “review bombing” takes as given the efficacy of digital homeopathic magic. Review culture in general lately consists of conscientious bids to shape reality, especially where controversial media releases are concerned: your modern-day Star Wars and Star Trek spin-offs, anything with the Harry Potter brand or JK Rowling’s name attached to it, high-profile productions accused of being “woke,” high-profile productions accused of being “anti-woke,” etc. The review sites, the comments sections, the free-for-all platforms, and sometimes even the gated communities of respectable journalism act as arenas where performers of manifestation rituals clash with performers of counter-rituals. An anti-fan who types out and submits a post, comment, or review along the lines of—Star Wars: The Acolyte is was an ill-conceived and poorly executed series that deservedly fell short of expectations because everyone is tired of woke cultural Marxists pushing The Message and the tide is definitely turning because The Industry finally realizes how much money it’s losing by chasing an audience that just isn’t there, etc.—conscientiously “exhales” energy and intention into cyberspace in the hope of imposing reality upon his words.

Where comment sections are still permitted to exist on news sites, we see much of the same. The most upvoted reader comment on a recent Washington Post article (“Harris and Trump vie for Jewish voters unsettled by Israel-Gaza conflict”) runs:

I’m an atheist of Jewish descent.

I don’t vote for fascists.

I don’t vote for Nazis.

I don’t vote for dictators.

I don’t vote for morons.

I don’t vote for anti-immigrant candidates, as I am descended from immigrants, who came here because of bigotry.

I will be voting for Harris.

In essence, the poster follows the same method toward the same end as our Star Wars: The Acolyte critic. The comment does not mean what it purports to say, i.e., “this is my position; do and think as you will;” its real meaning is: “this is my intent; let it be our reality.” This sort of incantation, as it were, seems to grow more potent as it amasses more upvotes and consolidates its position at the top of the board, where it will receive more attention and affirmation, congealing in virtual space as a quantum of will to be realized.

A reply reads:

Thank you for your post.

I’m of Middle Eastern descent.

I don’t vote for fascists.

I don’t vote for Nazis.

I don’t vote for dictators.

I don’t vote for morons.

I don’t vote for anti-immigrant candidates, as I am descended from immigrants, who came here because of bigotry.

I will be voting for Harris.

Online exercises in manifestation often imitate the call-and-response format of prayer; digital discourse has a predilection for the mimetic.

The efficacy of such speech will not doubted, even if the next Star Wars product pointedly centers queer POC bodies, even if Donald Trump oozes his way back into the Oval Office after winning the popular vote. Most of the positive feedback that signals the behavior’s efficacy and locks it in doesn’t come from the eventual trailer drop or election results, but from the fairly immediate effects of social validation feedback loops verifying that it’s working, that we’re succeeding at being the change we want to see in the world, that our energy is prevailing.⁸ When or if the trailer for Star Wars: Daisy Ridley and Amandla Stenberg Smash the Patriarchy hits YouTube, and viewers of Donald Trump’s second inauguration are turned literally to stone as they gaze into the most shit-eatingest smirk ever beheld, it will only amount to encouragement to keep trying. The early Christians, after all, weren’t put off by the gradual realization that the Second Coming wasn’t quite as imminent as they’d been given to understand.

I’ve ventured to say before that living in a high-tech society induces us to adopt more magical habits of thought, and the political and cultural conversations of 2024 haven’t done much to quell my suspicions. These mysterious transformations of history are endlessly fascinating to me, even if I’m a little apprehensive about what lies in store for us in our transition from science to ritual.

1. (1) If you’re interested:

A “mand”…may be defined as a verbal operant in which the response is reinforced by a characteristic consequence and is therefore under the functional control of relevant conditions of deprivation or aversive stimulation.

(2) On the infamy of Verbal Behavior: I am just going to leave this here and say nothing else.

2. (1) To be fair, I think she can be forgiven for making such a generalization.

In 2018, Reuters reported that before getting roped in the the international sex slave market, Nigerian women typically have curses placed upon them to place them in thrall to their traffickers. That year, Oba Ewuare II “summoned…juju priests to a ceremony at his palace and dismissed the curses they had placed on trafficking victims—and cast a fresh curse on anyone who went against his order.”

“Are African curses losing their sting?” asked a reporter for Kenya’s Sunday Standard in 2022. Despite its title, most of the article implies that the fear afforded to curses remains more or less undiminished. “The fear of curses and cursing is real,” says a quoted Kenyan academic. “A curse is a disturbing anguish in life and living irrespective of whether one is educated or uneducated; celibate churchmen and women, or laity; pauper or billionaire; a peacemaker or peacebreaker…”

Remember that Nigeria and Kenya are situated on opposite sides of the continent.

A chapter titled “Cultural Beliefs, Witchcraft and Crimes in South Africa” from the 2016 scholarly collection Religion, Faith and Crime: Theories, Identities and Issues summarizes the anti-witch frenzy that followed the end of Apartheid:

In the 1980s and 1990s, specifically the period just before and just after transition, South Africa experienced a spike in witchcraft-related violence, which amounted to more than 389 deaths...At this point the newly-elected ANC government decided to intervene and established the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders in the Northern Province in 1995. The commission was composed of several members and was headed by Professor Victor Ralushai…The commission was tasked to investigate witchcraft-related crime, and after a year since its establishment it published its findings in a report in 1996…

Despite the weaknesses in its report, the Ralushai Commission did make some useful recommendations based on its findings. First, the commission was correct in its recommendation that the Witchcraft Suppression Act (No. 3 of 1957) be repealed and replaced by more appropriate legislation. Second, several recommendations regarding improving the effectiveness of law enforcement in investigating witchcraft-related crimes were a step in the right direction…However, very few of these recommendations were given any serious attention by the government…

This is all just to say that while I recognize the sloppiness of talking about “Africa” and “Africans” instead of naming particular nations, regions, ethnic groups, etc., diverse beliefs in the efficacy of oral magic are, I think, sufficiently widespread across the continent for us to give some of our older sources a cautious pass for fudging the specifics.

(2) From Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982):

Since the disease or disaster is caused by something, in lieu of physical causes the personal malevolence of another human being—a magician, a witch—can be assumed and personal hostilities thereby increased. But violence in oral art forms is also connected with the structure of orality itself. When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high—both attractions and, even more, antagonisms.

3. Another remark from Skinner’s Verbal Behavior:

The reinforcement of verbal behavior through the mediation of a listener implies certain conditions which have important effects upon the dynamic properties of the behavior. For example, there is no relation between the energy of the behavior and the magnitude of the effect achieved. We sometimes shout to get action, but a whisper will have the same effect under other circumstances. The extent of the reinforcement depends upon the energy of the behavior of the listener, but only indirectly, if at all, on that of the speaker. This is not true of nonverbal behavior. A harder blow drives a nail farther. The distinction loses import as science develops systems of stored energy through which human behavior acquires expanding power and control. (It is possible that belief in verbal magic—the special power of words—declines for the same reason. The machine is the enemy of the word.)

It was a pat little aphorism before the machine became a ubiquitous vehicle for a form of multidirectional, simultaneous verbal behavior that ignores most temporal and spatial barriers. The fairly recent re-equivalence of hurtful speech (or writing) with violence should be proof enough that we’ve been made believers of the “special power of words” once again.

4. The acknowledgement of “stochastic terrorism” (even if it has been largely one-sided) seems rather like the perception of those “formal causes of configurational field” McLuhan attributes to people in primary and reactivated oral cultures.

5. We should probably attribute the correlation between the popularity of the adage “fake it till you make it” and increasing internet use to serendipity, and perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into how the Ngrams curve steepens right around 2005, when the URL facebook.com was registered by a Palo Alto tech firm—but these are curious coincidences. (In a sense, “fake it till you make it” repackages and rebrands Crowley’s “do what thou wilt”—and the old clarity of the distinction between what one wants and what one wills is important here.)

(Google Ngrams)

6. (1) By the same token, the God of Abraham was effectively real, as in factual, for the rural parish in medieval Christendom and the Puritan village of 1600s New England.

(2) Crowley: “in Nature it leaps at one that Will and Intelligence are behind phenomena.” In the physical world? Debatable. In cyberspace? Absolutely. We shan’t be surprised if it happens that Generation Alpha exhibits a kind of tacitly animistic or panpsychist worldview. (McLuhan: “Here, as ever, the medium itself is the ultimate message. The child gets such messages, when they are new, much sooner than the adult.”)

7. As spectacle, it’s kind of like You Got Served as a fever dream of Jürgen Habermas.

8. The illusion isn’t completely impervious to reality, as this classic post-mortem of the Hong Kong protests reminds us:

The rapture of the social media moment, of the headline and the story, has robbed Hong Kong of everything – the protestors have lost their war, the government has lost Beijing’s trust, and China has lost a city it always hoped to woo rather than coerce. And the poor of Hong Kong are still poor and the rich are still rich, and the Chief Executive will still go to work tomorrow and the freight will continue to come in and out of Victoria Harbour. The revolution of our times has worked out, in the end, to have been a great headline and a fascinating story, and a great way to get a book out or start a career in activism – but because it fell in love with itself, because it fell prey to the delusions of social media, like a guy narcissistically looking at his own Instagram feed and going “damn I have a lot of followers” and then spending the night inside waiting for more, it was always going to end like this.