I’m having a lazy Saturday morning in my kitchen, and pottering through Erik Davis’s gloriously out-there tome Techgnosis (it says on the blurb: “writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervour have always permeated the story of technology”. Being only 17 pages in, I can’t tell you yet whether he achieves this goal; but I’ve laughed out loud twice with sheer delight, so things are looking promising.)
Reading his musings on the Greek god Hermes, it strikes me that here is a deity who (in contrast to the average 21st century ministry of foreign affairs) does not want for a robust theory of influence. Instead of sending our new diplomatic recruits off on rather dry training sessions like this, they should be dispatched to study the relevance of the Hermetic archetype to their craft:
Of all the godforms that haunt the Greek mind, Hermes is the one who would feel most at home in our wired world. Indeed, with his mischievous combination of speed, trickery and profitable mediation, he can almost be seen as the archaic mascot of the information age. Unlike most archetypal figures, who lurk in the violent and erotic dreamstuff beneath the surface of our everyday awareness, Hermes also embodies the social psychology of language and communication. He flies “as fleet as thought”, an image of the daylight mind, with its plans and synaptic leaps, its chatter and overload. Hermes shows that these minds are not islands, but nodes in an immense electric tangle of words, images, songs, and signals.
You see how ahead of his time young Hermes is? Not only is he already fluent in social network analysis as a core tool for his brand of diplomacy, but he understands that the content that flows through these networks is not just rational analytical discourse: much more fundamentally, he recognises a broader spectrum of “words, images, songs and signals“. This is not a diplomat who considers the (shudder) core script part of his communications arsenal.
[While] Apollo can be considered the god of science in its ideal form – pure, ordering, embodying the solar world of clarity and light – Hermes insists that there are always cracks and gaps in such perfect architectures: intelligence moves forward by keeping on its crafty toes, ever opening into a world that is messy, unpredictable, and far from equilibrium. The supreme symbol for the fecund space of possibility and innovation that Hermes explots is the crossroads – a fit image as well for our contemporary world, with its data nets and seemingly infinite choices.
So Hermes is a trickster, too – and a thief. Sure, he’ll use engagement or shaping strategies, that respectively catalyse or focus a debate, when he needs to; but he’s equally willing to use disruptive (or, dare one speculate, even destructive) strategies when the nature of the debate is not to his liking.
Moreover, he understands that public diplomacy takes place in a context of complexity and instability, where not only the list of players but the very rules of the game are in a constant process of flux. This is a diplomacy that takes place not in the august, Apollonian surroundings of diplomatic receptions on the Ambassador’s veranda or the Locarno Rooms at King Charles Street, but in altogether messier ‘in-between places’, where the role of the diplomat him/herself is constantly adaptive, changing and unstable. And, as Davis goes on:
Crossroads are extremely charged spaces. Here choices are made, fears and facts overlap, and the alien first shows its face: strange people, foreign tongues, exotic and delightful goods and information. Crossroads create what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal zones”: ambiguous but potent spaces of transformation and threat that lie at the edge of cultural maps. Here the self finds itself beyond the limits of its own horizon. “Through Hermes,” the mythographer Karl Kerenyi writes, “every house becomes an opening and a point of departure to the paths that come from far off and lead away into the distance.”
Ah: give it up for Hermes. He’s all about understanding that ‘in here / out there’ distinctions break down altogether in a world of networks and crossroads. In David and my forthcoming paper The New Public Diplomacy: towards a theory of influence for 21st century foreign policy, we quote the author Michael Gibbons, who argues that the kind of innovative policy entrepreneurs that we need more of in today’s foreign ministries are constantly ‘burrowing out’ of their organisations in search of the ‘grey spaces’ where they meet up with like-minded collaborators.
Being able to do that effectively absolutely relies on being willing and able to participate in conversations fully: not just deploying key messages, but understanding conversation as a fundamentally two way process, in which both sides change and evolve as a result of the conversation (something conspicuously absent from, say, the Karen Hughes school of public diplomacy). So when David Miliband calls (rightly) for a new diplomacy, is that Hermes we can discern just behind his shoulder, whispering mischievously – “there’s nothing new under the sun”?
