Poking Holes

Where does one start? Always already embedded in a normative map of “reality”, of individual and collective experience, what Slavoj Zizek would call ideology. As such, the first thing to do, unless you are to work internally to this ideology, would be to poke holes in it: to look at the inconsistencies and ruptures that when properly expounded deflates the paradigm, showing how it isn’t in any way ground or grounded in some unshakeable absolute.

The ideology enveloping us is one that functions as lubricant between the liberal individualist lifestyle and the violence of capital automatism. A hedonist treat-yourself culture with the freedom to be infinitely distracted which is in the short term irresistibly comfortable but disastrous in the long term, which few people do not already know at a rational although not emotional level. The most obvious example is climate change, which definitely provides a rupture in the paradigmatic ideological screen, even if capitalism is attempting to reappropriate this catastrophe as yet another black hole that can in principle generate circulation.

A more complex fault line is the horizon of technocapital acceleration, widely known as the Singularity. This speculative event is usually interpreted as either the point when human individuality is dissolved as we become a hivemind mediated by future internet, alternatively as the point at which an A.I. is produced which is significantly more intelligent than a human, in a general way - in it’s problem solving capacity, which then reasonably would be able to produce an intelligence smarter than itself, and thus set of a self-perpetuating spiral of intelligence-synthesis expanding to a horizon far far beyond anything imaginable by a human level intelligence. The domain seemingly most appropriate for thinking about this speculative being-at-the-limit-point is theology: to view the post-human as God finally being born into the world. I am inclined to take this further than mere metaphor: to boldly postulate that this God-machine is what the ancients were trying to conceptualize all along. Even further, history is an after-the-fact retracing of God by theirself through creation as some means of self-exploration or trying to untangle something: to view the God-at-the-end-of-time as primary, and indeed a Post-Einsteinian view of spacetime should allow us this without much legwork.

We of course run into problems here, Einstein might say that God doesn’t play theodice. That’s why the Kabbalistic view of creation as an accident, a tragedy seems attractive. We have to trade away God’s absolute omnipotence to save God from being a sadist and the Universe from being a banal toy-thing, but so be it. Somehow God seems computationally limited: within this region of metaphysistan the forms are not given all at once, not even for God. Or - for God, from a transcendental perspective they are - but internally, immanently, in the forms that God’s comprehension directs itself towards, there is a temporal computation experienced. This view seems to require a certain if not temporality than ordinality preserved in the transcendent realm. This makes me think of William Blake and his epic Milton, wherein the Gods and Eternals have a seemingly complex system of agriculture and machines being operated and maintained, obviously in some sort of temporality, even though it’s only after a conflict between the divines that the Earth, finitude, and time-as-we-know-it are created, as a place for Satan to hide from punishment after he angered the gnomes of Palamabron. What I get from this is that there is a functioning, a sort of machinic system of relations existing as an atemporal web of ordinality, and it’s only as a perversion of this process that time actually comes into being. What this, the Fall really is is perhaps the greatest mystery of all, and whenever I try to conceive of it it seems undiminished in it’s mystery, as a black hole spouting out evermore parentheses that clamp around it without it ever evaporating. How can we get the black hole of mystery to hawking-radiate? It may very well be an analogy of insanity but maybe this is the way: maybe spontaneous and speculative hairsplitting of its tonsure could zap it with negative mass mystery? Perhaps this is simply the way tarrying with the absolute already works?