Читать книгу The Radical Singularity - Mane Tatulyan - Страница 7

Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is, lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind’s gaze had to be directed under the compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man’s mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the early that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

The noise of the media is the symphony of the époque. The baroque of information, our proliferate and viral art. The global agenda, our civic and ideological architecture. After the burial of the humane, capitalist production and digital folklore created a new civilisation. These new humans seem to have reached infinity, shot from Earth beyond Mars, into the sidereal cyberspace of information. At least total equality (or homogenisation) was achieved since there is no longer any distinction between the real and the virtual, the natural and the artificial, or the human and the machine. This is life in the information biosphere of the Global Village. In addition, we are all eco and above all friendly, and in return, the liturgy of the organic liberates the conscience (fat-free, sugar-free, GMO-free, gluten-free, CO2-free) and the digital network, the body: every time more light and more docile, like life or emptiness.

Long time ago, we invented the sky. The earth was not enough to calm earthly uncertainties nor to confirm immortality. The space was too vast to be empty, to have been created out of nothing. We flood it with myths, stories, desires. To fill the vastness of the cosmos, we created an idea vaster than the Universe itself. We called it God. It was only a matter of time before what was once empty became an axiom, a kingdom, a weight. There is no simultaneous place for God and Men. God is already dead (like History or the Enlightenment). He is not even frozen (like Walt Disney) to be potentially resurrected in the future. And death (or oblivion) is not fatal because it is the end of things but because it is the beginning of emptiness.

The human being dies so that God is born. Then God has to die so that the subject is born. Then the subject dies, and we are left with only an objective and realised world.

It is said that we live in a period called Postmodernity (which we are not even able to define). Postmodern delusion is loss hysteria. God is dead. Marx is dead. The human being is dead. Economics is dead. And only the chaos of appearances remains (Sokal and Bricmont). Neither Modernity nor its «solids» could survive this fatality, this delusional reproduction towards infinity accomplished by forgetting the meaning (or the narrative). Even more than a post-Modernity, we should call this period anti-Modernity since it is the historical antithesis of the modern Idea. Modernity, freed from its Idea, turned progress into progressivism, equality into egalitarianism, liberty into liberation, Reason into artificial intelligence, the human being into information, humanism into transhumanism, and so on to infinity. The paradox is that things are destroyed both by their disappearance and by their excess. Any previous antithesis are forms of the surplus, of the cancerous, of what abandons its roots (already dead) and grows above its original reason. With Gehlen’s formula, «the premises of the Enlightenment are dead, only its consequences continue on». In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas tells us that, «as soon as the internal links between the concept of Modernity and the self-understanding of Modernity gained from the horizon of Western reason have been dissolved, we can relativise, as it were, the automatically continuing processes of modernisation from the distanced standpoint of a postmodernist observer. From this perspective, a self-sufficiently advancing modernisation of society has separated itself from the impulses of a cultural modernity that has seemingly become obsolete in the meantime; it only carries out the functional laws of economy and state, technology and science, which are supposed to have amalgamated into a system that cannot be influenced» (1). «From his point of view – Habermas continues – the modernisation of society, cannot survive the end of the cultural from which it arose. It cannot hold its own against the primordial anarchism under whose sign Postmodernity marches» (2). At the end of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, Hegel already sensed that our age is a «golden sunrise», traversing «the last stage of history». The end of history has been discussed about ad nauseam. However, it is worth asking, can we reach the end of what has already been lost?

Everything «post» is today crossed by the «trans». Postmodernity seems to be a transition, a dead time between Modernity (already concluded) and Posthumanism (or disappearance); it is a time of disintegration of one form towards a new stage. Postmodernity is «trans» in the sense that it rejects its origin and exceeds its nature; it is radical transmutation and the transfiguration of Modernity, not to mention transparency and transience. It is the era of transeconomics, transpolitics, transaesthetics, transsexuality and transhumanism; all of them are categories of the liberated par excellence, new forms in which all signs are released, intermingled, confused, undifferentiated, and ultimately, they are indifferent (since there are no longer rules of meaning or combination).

The world alone does not have a meaning. It is the ideas in the minds of men that, through Reason, are found in the ideas of the world. Without its ideas, the world (and everything) disorders. Modernity was a process of historical rationalisation (Weber), a new way of understanding, structuring and signifying the world (and the place of the human being in that world). For the first time, there was no longer a human being in the image and likeness of God but rather a world in the image and likeness of the human being. Doubt went from being the cause of heresy to the root of existence and specifically to being the origin of knowledge. The shock of the «methodical doubt» (which would shake several domes and altars) was not sceptical-destructive but epistemic-constructive because its purpose was to achieve indubitable evidence. If, in the Renaissance, the light of the sun had become the centre of the Solar System, than in the Enlightenment, the light of Reason had become the centre of Modernity. Reason animated the movement of the modern spirit that had just been born, and that soon would spread to all areas of Western culture. The Lights of the 18th century sought to reconstruct a form of interpretation and generation of history, not only in the philosophical and scientific fields but also in economics, politics, aesthetics – in short, in all the organs that constitute the totality of the human being. The spirit of Modernity was the expression of a radical optimism towards the world and the human being through which the meta-narratives of societies would be written. From Cartesian certainty to the dialectical movement of the Hegelian absolute, consciousness was the basis of the subject, which would become the genesis of the production of meaning (Hegelian philosophy being the consummation and absolutisation of the subject through historical dialectics). Postmodernity puts an end to meaning itself in favour of a generalised simulation that puts an end to the dialectic of meaning. We no longer know what our representation of the world is. Down with the enlightened imperialism of Reason, the strike of truth and progress, the great stories, and the monolith of Modernity! This is the toast of Postmodernity.

How does the disorder start? With oblivion. The liberated, first of all, forgets. It forgets its essence, its cause, its consequence, its memory, its future, and above all, its death. The human being, freed from its idea, proliferates uncontrollably from its genes towards infinity with its technologies, circuits, emancipations, rights, ideologies. When this anomaly of radical liberation expands and colonizes all the organs of life (even the idea of life itself), the social body will be weakened by excess useless matter, by metastatic disorder due to the loss of the idea of the organism as a whole. This same phenomenon at the cellular level is what we commonly call cancer. In general, the entire subject dies, and along with it, its own diseased cells.

What is liberated is that which proliferates beyond its ends, an insane or disorderly propagation. It is no coincidence that the Postmodern ethos is crossed by the virulent since that is the fate of everything that loses its idea or its essence. If Modernity brought anthropocentrism with it, today we have neither «ánthropos» nor the «centre» since everything is freed from its reason and its original meaning. For Newtonian mechanics, the further a body moves from its rotating centre, the more its centrifugal force increases (it is enough to free the body from its axis so that it detaches indefinitely). Our civilisation has turned itself into an accelerator of unstable and ephemeral particles that disappear in milliseconds. In our collider of history, events collide with each other, mix, become confused, proliferate, disappear. And so begins the confusion of a humanity that has no past, that, freed from all its already obsolete functions (nature, Reason, death, beauty, history, language, etc.), becomes radically anthropocentrifugal. Goodbye to Modernity, goodbye to that historical moment that maintained that singular balance between Reason and emotion, between science and art, between subjectivity and collectivity (and which has already passed into the archives of postmodern revisionism).

We are in the «post» era, but this is not a posteriority of the future but of floating, in other words, a time of transition, the swelling of the corpse of history, the feast of the Eternal Present. Augé wondered «what happened to confidence in the future? History, until the relatively recent past, had been written from the point of view of the future: restoration, progress and revolution». But today, everything is sold out: the end-of-season sales, the bestsellers, the limited editions, as well as the ideas, the hopes, the illusions, Modernity itself. We have a Postmodernism that is so low-cost that we no longer even have heroes or idols, we have influencers. We lost everything, we only have our petrified present as a category of understanding ourselves; so minimalist and environmentalist is this present that we even discarded the past and the future, dumbfounded by the ideology of the present and, as Augé writes, «gradually becoming used to the image of a world without a past and without a future».

A humanity without a past is lost since it has no traces to return or advance to; a humanity without a future exchanges progress for excrescence and is ultimately paralysed in its own disorder.

Previously, we looked back on history to find something of respect or to recycle; today, only for revisionism: the de-fossilisation of history is done to finish it off via the vertigo of the impossibility of producing it (as there is no vision, there is revision). There is a kind of generalised revisionism, especially against the Age of Enlightenment, which leads intellectuals (such as Habermas or Pinker) to come to its defence since it has become a historical event in danger of extinction, an already fossilised inheritance that, in addition to being defended, must also be proven. Since Nietzsche, it has become not only be necessary to unearth it and finish it off but also to reduce it to «instrumental reason» or, worse still, to elevate it to the category of myth. At this rate, one day we will wonder if Rousseau ever existed or if there was someone named Newton; all of them mythical characters in a cultural tale. We are forcibly convinced that neither Modernity nor progress really existed, that the Dark Ages were not so dark, that the Enlightenment was not so bright, that it was utopian but that it marked the beginning of the murder of God. The religious neoconservatives accuse it of secularisation, individualisation, corruption and hedonism (which is nothing more than their own historical resentment at the banishment of God’s authority). There is total and fatal amnesia, which will leave us no choice but to rename Postmodernity or rewrite the history manuals. We erase humanism from history with revisionism, and humans, with robots, whereupon humans remain suspended in an intermediate stage between fossils and machines.

For the epistemic order of the Enlightenment, history (like physics) developed according to a fixed, immanent, irreversible and universal law; the straight line of Progress was the sense of the betterment of humanity. For the metastatic disorder of Postmodernity, the sense of historical continuity is totally pulverised by the annihilation of the idea of progress (which has further freed itself from its original meaning to become an indefinite and indifferent outgrowth). There is no longer historical unity nor the unifying power of Reason; that leading thread that Kant spoke of has been broken; that intention that Nature had hidden in the human being (and in history) to be discovered and practiced has vanished.«For example, the idea of progress has disappeared, yet progress continues» Baudrillard tells us. Progress continues, but in the politically correct version of it, what we call progressivism. The fossil clone of progress made us believe that radically liberated things work better, but it resulted in a society that lost criteria for having lost critics (which is the first sign of the annihilation of Modernity). This society, due to its lack of references, was condemned to an unbearable dualism: Zen but positivist, tribal but cyborg, vegan but tech, sexually liberal but dogmatic, revisionist but sceptical. Who would say that progress would become a type of involution or, worse still, a paralysis (of history and ultimately of thought).

Postmodernity is, in essence, an age of ruins. But our ruins are not like Luxor or the Acropolis, which have survived time or that resist oblivion due to their symbolic and historical grandeur. Conversely, ours are ruins without History and without time. Nothing we create seems to survive time (although what was left to us does not survive either). More than an era of ruins, Postmodernity is a great generator of waste. Environmentalism is nothing more than the artificial homeostasis of globalisation (a kind of collective photosynthesis that suddenly tries to take over all the waste of humanity). Everywhere we see an environmental boom: the «Green New Deal», «Fridays For Future», plant and animal rights (despite continuing violence against the human being). Green activists and the Greta Thunberg clan tell us about nuclear and industrial waste, but they never mention all the historical and ideological waste that we generated when we destroyed Modernity. Has anyone asked Greta Thunberg what we will do with all the waste of Modernity? What about progress? And human thought? What will happen to the fossils of history? Can they biodegrade in the information biosphere, or will they float like satellites? Does anyone know why we don’t talk about digital pollution? Where do all the leftovers from the media and networks go? And all those humans whose labours were replaced by machines? What’s more, is the human species also on the list of endangered species?

Modernity is to Postmodernity what the phantom limb is to the body. We amputated Modernity because we no longer needed that unbearable residue of History, but for some reason, we still secretly feel its presence (or absence). We still perceive sensations deriving from the missing limb, which somehow remains connected to the body and continues to function with it virtually. We are still in the postoperative period, the operation being the zero degree of rupture and liberation. Hence, even its own term, Postmodernity, evidences that we are in an era that does not even define itself for what it is but rather for what it ceased to be (hence its prefix «post», that is, everything that comes after Modernity, but it goes not have its own definition or noun and acts as a prosthesis or cancer metastasis). We no longer know what to do with the corpse of Modernity. Nor do we know if Modernity is the ghost that haunts us, or if we are the phantasmagoric spectre of Modernity’s death.

It is also no coincidence that our current time is the Digital Age. Even the screens themselves are secretly always reflecting our ghostly image, our holographic clone from the cybernetic afterlife. The hologram is not a shadow, a portrait or a spirit. The hologram is the radiation of the subject that disintegrates due to technique, it is a light and artificial clone that is pixelated on the computer screen. The most interesting thing about this virtual double is that it is always there, but we never manage to see it because of the light whitening of the screen. Our own image is erased in front of us. Only the ghostly clone of virtual reality survives. We are visible to the machine but holograms to ourselves. Perhaps this was the function of technology: to remind us of our own disappearance; and it is precisely because the machine has replaced the human being that we try to become machines (so as not to lose ourselves in oblivion).

1- Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Polity Press, 1987. P. 13.

2- Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Polity Press 1987. P. 13.