Читать книгу The Radical Singularity - Mane Tatulyan - Страница 8

When things, signs or actions are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction. […] Could it be that all systems, all individuals, harbour a secret urge to be rid of their ideas, of their own essences, so as to be able to proliferate everywhere, to transport themselves simultaneously to every point of the compass? In any event, the consequences of a dissociation of this kind can only be fatal. A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who was lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil

One of the consequences of decomposition is the release of energy. The decomposition of Modernity was the beginning of this epidemic of liberation that spread throughout all spheres and in which we have detached ourselves from the referential nuclei of things. Sexual liberation, the liberation of women, the liberation of animals, political liberation, spiritual liberation, the liberation of energy: all events are accelerated until they reach a kinetic energy that can expel them even from their own Idea. Acceleration propels particles into a space of total indeterminacy and uncertainty, into a stage where they no longer even respond to themselves. Newton’s second law states that the acceleration of an object is inversely proportional to the mass of the object. That is, the greater the mass of an object, the less its acceleration will be if a given net force is applied to it. For this reason, it is necessary for things to fragment into tiny particles, to become atomic, if they are to accelerate their path of liberation. Luckily in the technosphere this is not a problem since information can enter networks and computers for its infinite circulation and reproduction.

Behind liberation lies a secret: infinity. Things freed from their Idea are condemned to infinite reproduction. Expelled from their orbit, the particles are liberated from their centre and infinitely float in outer space. The Idea is what organises a form; disorder begins with its loss, with the forgetting of that meaning. Each released particle is infinitely reproducible, inserted in the vacuum of space for viral propagation and circulation. What is liberated is free to interchange and fully available to be manipulated and exchanged since it no longer has references or principles. That is why today everything is «trans» since things go beyond themselves and are free to exchange the signs of all discourses, which leads to total confusion and the impossibility of determining stable criteria for things (the logical consequence of the illogism post-truth).

One of the forms of liberation is technical reproduction. When Walter Benjamin analysed the work of art in the era of technical reproduction, he was announcing how the irruption of technique had begun to affect the aura of works of art. Benjamin identified the aura with the singularity, which «here and now» is the core of authenticity, that unique manifestation of distance (since bringing things closer is the desire of the masses). Even the best finished reproduction is missing something: its here and now, its irreproducible existence in the place where it is in that singular existence and nothing else. Even so, Benjamin already intuited that what was lived in the plastic field was what in theory was noted as the increase in the importance of statistics, a technification that was inevitably political. Art was showing the first symptoms of the anomaly that would later spread to the various fields of the human being’s life.

Every liberation has its consequences. There is a moment, that precise instant before things are released, which results in the inflection point that completely changes the concavity of the curve. The time before that exact point can be eternal or indeed, history. But after that moment, there will never be a way to return to the previous state. The liberated belongs precisely to this dimension. There are certain events that change not only things but also the course of things. Our civilisation is past technological acceleration and about to arrive at one of these points. It is almost as if all events lead to that culmination, to that moment just before the inflection. Of all the liberations, liberating the human being from the human is undoubtedly the most catastrophic. For this reason, we must get rid of all those ethical and moral values that limit experimentation. In Britain, headless frog clones have been produced for some time as a test for future cloning of human organs. It is believed that, if these human copies are decapitated, they will not technically be embryos. Thus, these future deposits of headless humans can be used and discarded infinitely since a certain absence in them will make us forget that we are dealing with humans.

When the gene is liberated from the chromosome, it becomes information.

When sex is liberated from biology, it becomes gender.

When thought is liberated from the human being, it becomes artificial intelligence.

When humanism is liberated from the human, it becomes posthumanism.

When events are liberated from the real, they become media.

When the world is liberated from reality, it becomes virtual reality.

In all orders, the technique directs the whole process of liberation.

Liberation may be a policy for technological purposes, but it is also a technology for political purposes. Liberation fights are, in essence, mechanisms of control. Today, the defence of diversity is nothing more than another form of centralised production of differences, which makes the different something accessible by removing its true alterity and making it fall (like everything else) into the laws of the market, into the logic of supply and demand. All the mobilisations of liberation dilations of the dead body of the Marxist dialectic which only maintain the form of the dialectic but not the content. They are Marxisms translated from the economic order to the cultural order (Lind), materialised in the form of struggles: struggles for freedom that ultimately become precisely another form of coercion. Even the rebellion of the proletariat (or the original Marxism) against the capitalists was the demand of a majority over a minority. Today, on the contrary, we are witnessing the imposition of the rights of a minority over the majority, basically a polar mechanism of two minorities: global elites and minority groups. Thus, the social body between the two poles (the true majority) is totally annihilated by the interests of the two poles, in a new political megastructure that has altered the natural order of things.

The liberation struggles work with the following formula: every repression corresponds to a liberation. First it is necessary to create repression and then offer the release dose. The paradox of all this is that the system forces us to liberate ourselves, which is a stupefying type of coercion because it already makes it difficult to distinguish how much of that desire for liberation is either natural or artificial. In their automatic search for liberation and fulfilment, individuals cease to be free, and therefore, the problem of freedom can no longer even be posed; in a total operability leaded by the imperative of being themselves. The current form of servitude is not the absence of freedom but, on the contrary, an excess of freedom, that «the realm of freedom, from which there is no escaping» (Baudrillard).

One of the political objectives of liberation is to remove all ties that prevent us from total expression, so one of its war objectives is to destroy the unbearable solidity of the human essence. The progressive imperative tells us that the a priori conceptions defining the human being are already outdated, that true identity is gestated in culture as a process of social construction. Furthermore, all those intolerable binaries (beauty/ugliness, man/woman, human/inhuman) must be annihilated in pursuit of equality and democracy. Paradox: since uniformity has triumphed, diversity has never been discussed more. In the democratic and politically correct ecosystem, the defence of free thinking and diversity is directly proportional to the parallel prohibition of thought and discrepancy (which automatically becomes clandestine).

When nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore, art disappears; when nothing is male or female, biology disappears; when nothing is natural or artificial, the human disappears. The epitome of indefiniteness therefore leads to indifference.

Nothing matters anymore. Indifferent and undifferentiated, total and radical relativity. When things lose their essence or their concept, nothing is what it is. Liberation has no past; its quality is indeterminacy (of space, time, body, the human being, art, totality). But this conglomerate of demands for liberation is offered as human rights. But not even Plato or Aristotle spoke of rights, but rather they spoke of the good and of human happiness and, as a consequence, of the duties and virtues needed to achieve them. It is a paradox that natural rights are necessary today but are based on completely unnatural foundations (as Rousseau writes, it is precisely ignorance of human nature that dispels the true definition of natural law). The contemporary use of the term «rights» is totally emptied of that divine, natural and transcendental meaning (as Watson says, reaching totally absurd extremes). When the rights (of the masses) and the interests (of power) merge, freedom becomes another available capital, and one passes from the right to freedom to the categorical imperative of liberation.

While liberty corresponds to the universal, liberation corresponds to the global. Although they are commonly confused, the universal is a system of values that maintains equality on top; while in globalisation, levelling occurs at the bottom: this is, as Baudrillard writes, the Disneyfication of the world. Liberty is found in the symbolic order of the subject, circumscribed in its nature, its purpose and its self-determination. Liberation, on the contrary, exceeds all orders and the subject itself, and goes outside of its nature. It is a process without finality: the distance of the detached particles depends on the force of the release. Liberty was an ideal of Modernity; liberation, that of Postmodernity. Liberty has already been relegated to history, to Modernity, since it has been totally overcome by liberation and by the disappearance of the subject. The free subject thinks of itself and therefore of the world. The liberated individual, on the contrary, is thought by the world.