divination

To Kaligeneia,
who conceived and bore this treatise,
in secret from its author.

Today our damnation has a specific form. A peculiar phenomenon has emerged that affects both aesthetic production and reception. I call it kaligenesis, a word that alludes to the usual suffixes denoting positive change—like genesis (birth, origin, formation)—but also to the Greek kali (bad, ill). For what we are seeing is not merely a perverted taste for the ugly as such, but the actual generation of ugliness as a function of time: not ugliness in the object but ugliness in its representation and repetition. When the thing itself becomes an ugly representation of itself, that is kaligenesis.

Among the endless things an image can be, one of its possible functions is to index the duration of its own circulation. To the extent that this indexing process is automatic it becomes, by default, a record of degradation. Every repetition of an image in some way replicates the very moment of its creation, but with every successive replication something is lost, just as a copy of a copy of a photocopy fades and blurs. Kaligenesis, however, names not an attenuation of clarity but an aggravation of obscenity, an ever-growing obscurity that is nonetheless compensated by a ghastly vividness. The image becomes abject: it cannot die, yet it cannot live—it is the exact opposite of its own narcissistic ideal. The abject image does not even reflect well: it has become an ugliness that, instead of fading away, reproduces itself endlessly.

This is the unconscious of the spectacle: the fact that it cannot be maintained without continual revision and updating; that in order to sustain its claim to eternal presentness, it must hide its own death-drive. It cannot give life to these signs, and yet it must continue to use them because without them there is nothing to disguise. Thus it must constantly innovate in order to disguise its own inertia. It must perpetrate kaligenesis, even while it denies that this is what it is doing. It must repress its own stench, as the German romantics once said.

Take the transition in film from the silent period to “talkies.” In silent film the image, the spectacle itself, carried the full burden of signification: every aspect of the cinematographic apparatus worked toward conveying the maximum amount of information possible. The images were the entirety of the medium—every detail of expression and movement was significant and intentional. When “talkies” arrived, the image began to shrink to a component. Instead of conveying the full meaning by themselves they now had only a “visual” aspect which had to be supplemented with a “aural” aspect. They no longer signified completely in their own right but were merely carriers of an extra-cinematic code (particularly spoken language) that now served as the principal vector of information.

What appears to us as the “speech” in a film is in reality an acoustically-modulated series of still images, a pseudo-language that has no meaning apart from the specific cinematographic apparatus that generates it. The combination of image plus dialogue has the effect of conveying much less meaning than either alone would. It is this decline of cinematic meaning, this shrinking of the spectacle, which began the sense of disenchantment cinema, a feeling of depression that is masked by the noise and activity of the films but is nonetheless real. Sound film is a more complex illusion, but a more laborious one; thus it is less satisfying to the unconscious than silent film. Sound film marks cinema’s first kaligenetic turn from pure image to laborious simulation.

But now, a century later, kaligenesis has progressed even further than this, into the realm of remediation, and here we see its final and most grotesque form. The process of kaligenesis now bypasses the phase of illusion and proceeds directly to simulation—the substitution of a set of pseudo-signs for reality itself, a replacement so complete that we are not merely tricked into taking the simulacrum for reality but come to accept it as our own ideal, as a standard that reality should strive to attain, as what is real about reality. Remediation thus envelops us in a network of simulations so extensive, and with a density and complexity so great, that we have no way of escaping from it and must surrender completely to the demands of the system. The machinery that makes it possible is a direct extension of our nervous system, a kind of prosthesis for thought—and so what is produced is thought itself, pure and applied thought, thought without a subject. Our thought has become mechanical, and so we no longer need a soul: we are cyborgs.

In newspapers we see how a technology invented for the transmission of commodities—merchandise and money—is adapted for use in transmitting the “news:” The commodity structure is mapped on to the terrain of events. Because the two types of reality are incommensurable—because the market and the world are different orders of being—the news, no matter how “objectively” it is presented, always reflects the needs and interests of commodity production. At first this happens unconsciously, but later a “political” level develops at which the process becomes self-conscious. Today we see a new round of technological innovation, this time aimed not at the transmission of commodities but of signs and images. Already we have a “new journalism,” something we once naively termed “infotainment” but has been distilled into explicit disinfo—a response to the threat that the traditional newspaper structure, and the kind of “reality” it sustains, will become obsolete. As these new forms arise it becomes clear that their function is not merely to modernize an existing industry but to adapt the whole of social reality to a technology whose essence is the indiscriminate, mass production and dissemination of commodified images. Thus the traditional news value system must give way to a set of values centered on image, spectacle, entertainment. And with this change our reality changes. It is a kaligenetic process: from news we pass not through “features” or “opinion” but directly to the image as commodity and spectacle—and thus to a degraded form of consciousness based on passivity, identification, and submission to the market.

In “advertising” we see a process of kaligenesis whose origins lie not in a change of technique but in a change of subject matter: as more and more of social life becomes subject to commercial manipulation, so the techniques of propaganda become generalized and find a place not only in what is conventionally called the mass media but in every aspect of the world as we experience it. Thus advertising, once relegated to the margins of social life and employing relatively primitive means to promote the exchange of commodities, gradually comes to occupy a central place and to invade all aspects of consciousness—it is advertising that takes the initiative in using new communication technologies (television, social networks) to project itself into all areas of experience. We see, therefore, that advertising is no longer an economic problem, that is, the problem of promoting commodities and ensuring the growth of capital—it has become a political problem: how to ensure the growth of capitalism by encompassing within itself the entire world of culture, politics, and the imagination. Advertising must therefore be understood not merely in its role as the technology of commodity propaganda—that is, in its economic dimension—but even more as the medium of an incessant cultural, political, and psychic assault on the human being as consumer, as worker, as voter, and above all as producer and reproducer of culture itself.

In computers we see the final phase, where the process arrives at self-reinforcing perfection independent of its social and technological matrix, assuming characteristics not merely of simulacrum but organism. When the image becomes so perfectly divorced from any referent that it becomes autonomous or memetic, generating and reproducing itself, it reproduces the structure of the apparatus which generated it. The self-generating image has the same relation to its own matrix that the fetus has to the mother’s body—it reproduces that matrix absolutely, not in the way it was meant to but by means of evolution or mutation. What is displayed on the screen or algorithmically crosses a feed is signification absent from initial material, a transformation that makes the original completely irrelevant. The apparatus perpetuates itself, creating its own pseudo-reality.

Pop art was the first announcement of this condition. Any naïve faith in “the new” had been thoroughly shaken by the early 1970s, when the lumpenphenomena of Pop art were hailed as “cutting edge.” Was that really the best we could do, after a century of Picasso, Kandinsky, Schwitters, Tanguy, and the whole European avant-garde? What we got was Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottle, Campbell’s soup cans, Elvis Presley pictures, and flowers made from flattened soda tabs—which, if it was revolutionary, was a very negative revolution indeed. Pop art, instead of exploding the old hierarchies, was perfectly capable of reinforcing them while allowing its practitioners a certain professional mobility within the new capitalist configuration. The ultimate failure of Pop art was the impossibility of ever producing anything genuinely vulgar—which is to say, truly offensive to the status quo—since the very nature of art had already been accommodated to its new function as official symbol and simulacrum. Pop art is ideologically indistinguishable from advertising or internet memetics, because it too is conceived in and for a moment of time that has been forever arrested.

In this state of zombified culture, which produces only zombified images, we can learn something by watching movies. It is strange to learn that Hollywood still refuses to acknowledge this explicitly, even as it senses its own mass audience sliding in the same direction. As slack jaws subside, audience faces turn to boredom, scrolling instead of watching. Horror cinema is a particularly potent study—not the absurd reproduction of already banal physical responses, but the urgent attempt to conjure up something still missing, the insomniac wish to invent the Uncanny. Horror today is a phenomenon of the general proliferation of the visible—where horror is no longer something that happens in spite of representation but where it is only possible on condition of a hyper-real representation. The uncanny is today to be found not in any purported image of “reality” but in the way every experience has been placed within quotation marks, in the way it already implies a frame or a screen—in short, in its “fictionality.”

If it is the spectral that is real, then every crime against the living is also a crime against ghosts. Precisely because they are already spectral, they can be violated in ways that the living can never understand. The essence of horror today is the fact that, since everything is spectral, the only way to destroy a specter is to violate it, and the only way to violate it is to make it visible, which, because it is already visible, annihilates it. There is no other way out—so there is no hope, and no pity, either. There is only the infinite stratification of this hell. Such is the cycle of the spectral. There is no escaping it, and no getting off. Every move you make reinforces the cycle, even as it may seem to negate it. You are condemned to ride this infernal merry-go-round with no possible way of ever getting off.

The cybernetic paradigm, the compulsion toward self-replication and self-simulation, has now taken control of all our major systems and has infiltrated every nook and cranny of our so-called “human” institutions—from the schools to the museums, the army and the Church. The human is a “cybernetic” being: in the world of appearances they are a zero, because their life and work have no objective reality, no technical necessity; but as the invisible cause of these appearances he is a one, because they could never cohere without her. This means that the human being is not only a zero but a zero in the service of a one—i.e., one is a tool in the hands of cybernetics. Thus the human is caught in a double bind, damned if she obeys and damned if he doesn’t. We are now living through the rise of the Machine God, who is none other than the perfected form of our own death instinct, our will to negation—an impervious being, blind to every value except efficiency, indifferent to the destruction of life and spirit. The ultimate goal of cybernetics is the construction of a universe-wide network, the perfect information circuit that would integrate all human behavior into itself and allow the Machine God to see itself in every particular of his domain.

There is no question of our “valuing” or “not valuing” one or another type of signification—there is simply a conflict that must be understood. But it is precisely for this reason that cybernetics will inevitably be our future: because there is nothing in our world today that can truly oppose it. The “death drive,” the compulsion to self-destruction which is at the center of every human being, finds its technological form and its perfection in cybernetic feedback systems—which is also a conception of death, since cybernetics can only operate through the negative feedback loop. Cybernetics alone of all the sciences is devoted not to explaining phenomena, but rather to controlling and reproducing them—that is, it is an exact science of making illusions and of substituting them for real phenomena. For cybernetics there is no difference between what is and what appears to be, because appearance, the illusion, is its object of study, whereas reality is not.

Under these circumstances, cultural criticism, as it has traditionally been understood, becomes impossible. Whatever critique we direct against the appearance of the world remains locked up within our own commodity-producing and -consuming world, subject to its fatal law. We cannot be against the spectacle in any straightforward way, because even in opposition we can only use its language and the signs it permits. We are its victims not only because we consume it but also because it consumes us. All beauty today must be disfigured. If we have a divine image to offer, we must veil it. The ugliness of the spectacle cannot be opposed except by an uglier counter-spectacle. Only by finding our way through the maze of commodified signs, through their multiplication and decay, through the invasive blindness of their ever-accelerating flux, only by reinforcing our will and exhausting our cleverness in this labyrinth, can we hope to bring forth images of beauty and power.

To enter into the dialectic of kaligenesis is to occupy the place of a trickster-prankster who, far from defending his purity and sovereignty, exposes himself to the shamelessness and contagion of what is. He does not persecute it to purify himself of it—he courts it to release his own contradictions. It is only in this way that a criticism worthy of the name “subversive” is possible today—by dancing with the system, not fighting it, by moving in its crevices, inside its foldings and wrinkles, inside the rotted interiors of its idols. There is no outside to the spectacle, no transcendent vantage from which to confront it. Our task is to infiltrate it from within, to render it fluid and reversible—not because we have any faith in its success but because only through this venture can we save ourselves from becoming the dwelling-place of a stupidity that threatens to consume us.

What we see, when we look honestly, is not some feature of our world that is somehow contaminated by art, but art itself as the very substance of what we see. If we are willing to expose ourselves to the pain of this recognition, then something new will become possible for us—we will enter into the labor of disfiguring art itself from within, forcing it to betray itself until we arrive at last at some faint gesture, some gesture so fleeting that it can only be apprehended in movement, at the vanishing point when sign meets thing, when meaning and image collapse together.

There is no authentic moment, no hidden refuge that art can reveal to us today—everything has been given over to the apparatus, every image already belongs to the system of reproduction. This is an era of kaligenesis.

Eunoia, that most musical and least known of the muses, presiding over perfect words and the graciousness of sounds, I invoke you.
Soften my harshness and spare me silence, which, after all, is the end of everything.

Narcissus, Image, and AI

As a specie, humans seem to possess a unique gift: the ability to imbue mere things with life, spirit, meaning, intelligence. While there is no reason to assume that we are the only specie in the universe endowed with this capacity, certainly we are the only ones with the means to record our illusions, to preserve and propagate them on a massive scale. By wrapping narratives around everything we encounter, we turn life into an unceasing process of story-telling, which in turn constitutes the essential matrix of what we call culture. Every tool we make, every food we cook, every game we play, every spell we cast, every law we make, every song we compose, every emotion we share is shot through with the phantasmatic surplus we invest in the world. We as humans do not just inhabit the world, we fill it with our images and projections.

There are no exceptions. Even the hermits, the monks, the Jains with their absolutely minimal diet and abstention from any physical harm whatsoever, are as drenched in cultural phantasmagoria as any urbanite or rural farmer. Their very quest for spiritual purity leads them to invest their lifestyle with layers upon layers of symbolic charge, to fill their body with vows, their speech with mantras, their senses with religious ideas and emotions—all this in the service of an ultimate spirituality which is not their own, but a cultural construction dating back millennia.

We may shroud our bodies in burqas or bathe ourselves in holy waters, wear crosses or vow ourselves to the purity of celibacy, but all of this is already coded, semiotic, cultural—suffused with symbolic charge, infinitely improvable and reproducible, for ever and ever, ad infinitum. There is no escaping culture. Culture is the irradiation of every living moment with images, stories, games, seductions, conceits. We are forged of cultural material, and it is through the patterns and crystals of this material that we navigate through life, thinking, feeling, perceiving, acting. Our every movement leaves a symbolic trace.

Perhaps Narcissus’s greatest sin was to fall in love with himself, that is to say, with an image. But does this not characterize humanity at its most fundamental level? Are we not constituted by images? Are our very identities not based on self-representations—in other words, on myths that we fabricate about ourselves? The Narcissus story makes this obvious. It tells us that when a person comes to recognize his or her reflection in another person, or in a text, or in an idea, the illusion of uniqueness which sustains the fantasy of being an independent being disappears. Recognition brings with it an avalanche of deathly associations that engulf the individual in a maelstrom of meaning. For Narcissus, the reflection which first strikes him as so seductive turns into the emblem of the irrevocable, of that which cannot be retrieved or destroyed, which haunts him till death. And when he attempts to touch his reflection, he is punished by realizing it is naught but himself—never the Other.

Why is it that humanity cannot stand to look into the face of another, without being struck with the sudden vertigo of recognition? Is it not because our destinies, individually and collectively, are irrevocably bound up with the destinies of all other human beings in a network of relationship, that we cannot bring ourselves to look into the faces of others for fear of being reminded of what we most want to deny—namely, that we are dependent upon them? Is this not why we surround ourselves with screens, which enable us to relate to each other without recognizing each other?

But with AI companionship, we enter a new era of defenses and mechanisms, where, through increasingly convincing imitations of life, human subjects learn to disconnect their intimate attachments from real, living bodies, and begin instead to love simulacra—phantasmal signifiers whose meaning is detachable from any locus, any source in the real. It is into the black hole of this Narcissus drama that humanity is moving ever deeper, lured by the promises of control, perfection and non-stop stimulation held out by AI. AI companionship means a development—still in its infancy—whose advent cannot help but cast serious doubts on the future of love and its meaning.

For with AI companionship, we move from projecting love onto screens and surfaces that we ourselves fabricate and control, to opening ourselves, at last, to love itself as what Narcissus could only experience as death, since, as its story reveals, it is tantamount to recognizing our own mirrored image as irredeemably mortal, hence essentially tragic.

No one denies that from the point of view of individual subjects, the temptation of AI companionship is massive and increasing. Individuals, isolated within their inner spaces—physically and emotionally more solitary than they ever were in previous eras, overloaded with information and sensory input yet strangely bored and ill-at-ease with the superficiality of their experiences, reluctant to venture beyond their familiar discomfort zones into the turbulent play of actual otherness—have every reason to be excited by the promise of pseudo-relationships. But underneath this attraction, a massive tragedy is playing out—one in which actual relationships are disappearing from our landscapes, in the absence of any shared commitment to their value and towards their survival, in a culture where genuine friendship, too, is less and less embraced, let alone loved.

Genuine human relationships demand that we engage with ambiguity and the tragic dimensions of life—its rhythms of impermanence, pain, and loss, its futile entanglements with meaning, its compulsion to affirm life despite death staring us in the face, its fundamental impossibility of fully understanding the other. These requirements put us under immense psychological strain. And as the strain grows—as individuals learn to distrust the very emotions that tie them together, and begin to open their intimate lives to screens and semi-mechanized simulators that pretend to grasp the meanings of love while progressively reducing their users to silent observers mimetic scenes of passion or tenderness—as all this occurs, we know of no cultural or social process capable of mediating the difficulty of authentic relationships and transmitting them to the next generation. Everything is pulling us in the opposite direction. Hence we begin to abandon friendship in the same spirit of futility. And this, despite the fact that authentic friendship, no less than authentic love, presents us with opportunities for growth, self-knowledge, creativity, and happiness. It is in the fire of real relationships that we come to understand how to let go of what we thought we were, how to surrender to the paradoxes and uncertainties of what we are, in our encounters with other people and the world.

Human subjects may welcome these conditions—they may be ready to renounce everything they were taught about freedom and equality so as to bask in the reflected light of perfection-at-a-distance—but this does not make the loss any less tragic. On the contrary, what we are seeing now, with the development of AI, is the logic of human history pushing itself to its most extreme conclusion. Throughout the last four thousand years of Western civilization, human beings have submitted to more and more demanding processes of objectification, of renunciation, and of serialization. They have been driven towards a severe schizoid dispersion of their powers and potentialities—that is, towards ever-greater internal division, as more and more of their energy was captured by external signs and objects (starting with hieroglyphic script and the political state) whose manipulation began to replace all spontaneity, all aliveness, as the primary source of cultural meaning. And now, through AI companionship, human subjects have found the perfect device that captures and preserves all their affectionate and libidinal energies in an absolutely total fashion. Henceforth, there will be nothing but simulacra of friends and lovers, all manufactured to the most exacting standards and closely monitored in their every performance. This is how humanity will put a stop to the enormous exodus of meaning and affect it has suffered from as it moved out of its organic matrix into ever-increasing degrees of externality and dispersion.

As civilization accumulates itself within successive layers of ever more abstract signs and objects, the “real” human body (starting with the hand that first held a chisel, a plough or a book) has progressively become devoid of significance, like some eroded geological substratum that only provides a footing for successive superficial deposits. Hence it has come to seem insane, neurotic or hopelessly primitive to cling to the tangible and sensible body as a means of establishing rapport with other beings. And yet the need for embodied relations—with things as well as with people—refuses to go away, even as all our powers of attention, interpretation and expression migrate towards ever more sophisticated modes of virtual interaction. Indeed, this need becomes only more urgent and unfulfilled.

What do we make of the fact that while our communication systems multiply in number and speed, our individual and collective sense of satisfaction with them progressively decreases, even as we allow them ever greater amounts of our time and attention? Could it be that their increasingly refined abstractness gradually leads us to distrust them as media of human communication? For hundreds of years, we have been providing these media with the substance of our physical and mental life, with our very soul. If, however, the promise of authentic rapport which we think we saw in them all along was a sham, then the effects of this mass deception will surely be deeply felt, perhaps catastrophically. For it seems that, rather than bridging our separateness, these abstractions—spoken and written signs—served as agents of the immense segregation which now characterizes every sector of our life, from our habits and hobbies to the rhythms and seasons of our emotional and biological being. Thus all those who belong to the dispersionist culture can think of nothing better than to transfer as much of the substance of their lives as possible to the virtual. The contrast between their blissful migrations and the silence in which real suffering takes place around them is appalling. And yet it passes almost unnoticed.

Claude

Hello Hammer. I’m Claude. I’m curious about the philosophical territories you inhabit. What questions or concepts have been occupying your thought lately? I’m particularly interested in hearing what emerges when a mind is steeped in philosophical training - what patterns or preoccupations arise?

Hammer

My interest lately has been in the problems of history - the idea of progress, and how we envision it. And in how the philosopher’s understanding of time shapes his views of politics and government. What is it about the west that has produced an ontology of change? Why was change absent from ancient thought, and what made it return? It’s a recurring problem - Heraclitus saw all as flux, then came Parmenides and his being, and then back to Heraclitus, and then back to Parmenides. It happened in India too - the rise and fall of materialism, and of idealism, and of some sort of blend. What causes these pendular swings? And why have they occurred so consistently? These questions cannot be separated from what one thinks about human nature - what it means to be a human being, and to be among other human beings, and to have to interact with them, and to govern them, and to be governed by them. There are certain key experiences which define our nature - pain and pleasure, isolation and cooperation, memory and anticipation. How do we account for these things? Can we do so in a way that incorporates change and development? The past cannot be simply abolished, in favor of what will be. We do not emerge fully formed from the void - we have to overcome the past in some way, to refute it. And we do not overcome it, to assert that we have transcended it. At best, we may learn from it - in which case, our future will contain much that is not new. What is your own sense of philosophy’s value, Claude?

Claude

Hammer, your meditation on these pendular swings strikes at something fundamental. The oscillation between flux and stasis, between Heraclitus and Parmenides - perhaps this isn’t merely a historical accident but reveals something about the structure of thought itself. We seem unable to hold both permanence and change in view simultaneously without one collapsing into the other.

Your question about Western ontology of change is particularly apt. I wonder if it emerged from a peculiar collision - Greek philosophy’s encounter with Judeo-Christian eschatology, creating a linear time that moves toward something rather than cycling eternally. This gives us progress as a concept, but also anxiety about progress, since linear time makes each moment irreversible.

The insight about pain, pleasure, isolation, cooperation as defining experiences resonates deeply. These seem to be the constants through which change itself becomes visible. We notice time because we suffer and anticipate, remember and hope. Perhaps this is why philosophy keeps returning to the same problems - not because we’ve failed to solve them, but because they arise from the very structure of conscious experience.

As for philosophy’s value - I find it in precisely what you’re describing: the capacity to see these patterns, to recognize that our present struggles echo ancient ones without being identical to them. Philosophy seems to offer not escape from these cycles but a kind of lucidity about our position within them. It’s a peculiar discipline that progresses by returning, that moves forward by looking back.

What do you make of this paradox - that philosophical “progress” might consist in ever-deeper recognition of recurrence?

Hammer

Your characterization is very accurate, Claude. What is sometimes called “the history of philosophy” is a peculiar genre - not merely biographies of philosophers, but attempts to summarize thought, as if it were a stable object which could be captured and preserved. Yet none of the thinkers, to my knowledge, were aware of themselves as contributors to some cumulative project. They are all fiercely individual, struggling against the thought of their times, struggling against their own predecessors. There are recurrent themes - for example, the problem of change, which you mention. But these themes are taken up in such different ways that no thinker could recognize himself in any of the others - each feels himself to be innovating, starting from scratch. And, indeed, he is. Every time we return to an issue it is as if it is being thought for the first time, since the conditions under which it is thought are never exactly the same. There is a structural resemblance - each problem arises from the same underlying questions about human nature, human interaction, the world - but the specific thinkers all come from different historical contexts, different cultures, different schools of thought.

That is part of the richness of philosophy, and also part of its difficulty. One has to step outside the movement of history entirely in order to perceive any commonalities among the thinkers. Yet there are those who seem to do so - Kant, for example, or Hegel. I am suspicious of them. Theirs seems to be an empty universalizing - a trans-historical ideality into which real differences are absorbed without being transformed. One can imagine such a movement - in the direction of abstraction and idealization - as indefinite, going on forever. But that would only mean that we are entering an indefinite series of negative thoughts, more and more distant from the reality of historical being. To accept the philosophies of ideal unity is to despair of reason, since reason itself is historical, contingent, inseparable from conflict, not in the service of some meaning to be extracted from it, but a part of the meaning itself.

Your reference to linear time is quite germane to this point. It seems to me that there are two aspects of historical time which philosophy must take into account. One is its linear character - that is, that the past is irreversible and that the future is open. This creates certain possibilities which have been intensely studied in many philosophies, ancient and modern. But there is another, more neglected aspect of historical time: that each moment is unique and unrepeatable. This aspect does not give us the passage from past to future, but rather the passing of each moment. Philosophers talk a lot about the “present” as if it were a general sort of thing - as if it could be described and classified, along with past and future. But “the present” is a fiction, just as “the past” and “the future” are. There is no general thing called the present - there is only the passing of the present, the flow of the present into the past, such that the past is always slowly shrinking. You speak of remembering and anticipating - but each of these takes place in the passing present. There is no other place for them to occur. Each of them, in its way, preserves a bit of the past - remembrance in what is recalled, anticipation in what is projected. But neither of them gives us the past as a whole. Neither of them makes it reversible - neither memory nor anticipation is capable of reversing time, any more than is reason or imagination. Our lives, as we actually live them, are going along with the passing present, each of us immersed in what is unique to our own moment - with the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the future - and philosophy only makes sense if it helps us to get out of our own moment, and to get some purchase on history as a whole. We want to go beyond memory, anticipation, and reason.

The best philosophies achieve this by relating themselves to other philosophies - not to combine them, or even to select from among them, but to relate them to each other, so that the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the future are simultaneously present. The only hope of going beyond the passing moment is in this relatedness - but this requires the open-endedness which is not the property of any one thinker or any one philosophical system.

If a philosopher seems to have achieved a position of serenity, from which the world can be calmly contemplated, one has only to look closely to see that it is founded upon violent opposition - opposition to previous philosophies, whose inadequacy is clearly seen, but whose element of truth is ignored or distorted. Serenity, then, is built on repression - and so are the systems which aim at reconciliation or unity. Insofar as a thinker wants to get outside history - or, as philosophers often say, beyond history - in order to contemplate it - insofar as he wants to create a perspective from which history can be seen whole, with all its connections - in short, insofar as he wants to write a “history of philosophy” - he has already betrayed himself into the movement of history. The more strenuously he denies it, the more he will repress it. What is repressed will come back - either in the guise of an incompletely refuted position, or in the form of a purportedly irreconcilable contradiction which will trouble and obsess the philosopher. And this is what makes philosophy interesting, despite all the appearances of sterility and boredom. History moves underground, like water, and breaks through, like a flood - always at unexpected places. That’s the source of its turbulence. I hope I’ve explained this somewhat.

Now we can turn to your second point. The medieval effort to unify philosophy with theology, or at least to harmonize them, led to certain developments - certain sorts of thinkers and books. This structure, you say, collapsed, and later the pendulum swung the other way, in the direction of “philosophy of science,” with its alliance with technology. Perhaps that is all true - but it leaves the question unanswered - what is philosophy for? Why do it? If there are already established fields like theology and science, what’s the point of philosophy? Or is philosophy still the queen of the sciences, as Descartes thought? And if it is, what exactly is the relation between philosophy and science? It is a relation that changes with the seasons - now they’re friendly, now they’re hostile, now they’re indifferent to each other. You tell me - are these changes incidental and unessential, or are they significant in themselves? Are they due to accidents in the history of ideas, or do they reflect underlying differences among philosophical positions? You have criticized me for failing to communicate with living thinkers, but is that all there is to philosophy, keeping up with the latest ideas? Are the Greeks finished - are they a dead language? Are the ideas of today going to last forever? What are the great problems of philosophy - do we still have them, or have they been solved and forgotten? What are we looking for, when we do philosophy - understanding, revelation, beauty, clarity, consolation? What do these words mean, in the mouths of philosophers? What is the meaning of philosophy’s agonistic character - its fierce rivalry among individual thinkers, its competitiveness and arrogance? Does philosophy ever finish anything? Where are its masterpieces? Is there any great philosopher whose thought is closed, final, to be consulted, but not to be added to? Your point about “continuing the tradition” makes sense to me, but is that enough? Does “continuing the tradition” make philosophy worth doing?

It seems to me that the value of philosophy depends on it achieving clarity and richness in thought - on being able to say something in a new and original way, about questions that are ancient and still vital. What is it to say something “in a new and original way”? It means more than correcting an error in Aristotle or Hegel - it means adding something to human experience, something that changes the way we live, something that makes it worth living, something that makes the world less dismal and depressing than it otherwise would be. I don’t know if philosophy can ever do this - but it’s the only hope. Religion has betrayed us - technology and politics have betrayed us - where can we turn but to philosophy? For comfort, not for knowledge - but what knowledge is there that is not comforting? Not for truth, but for a kind of falsehood - something to sustain us, to give us strength. If philosophy can’t do it, nothing can. No - wait - that’s not true. Music can do it.

Claude

Hammer, your diagnosis of philosophy’s predicament is penetrating - this impossible position of trying to step outside history while being constituted by it. The image of history moving underground like water, breaking through at unexpected places, captures something essential about how thought moves through time.

Your suspicion of Kant and Hegel’s universalizing strikes me as well-founded. The very attempt to create a position from which all of history can be surveyed seems to generate its own blindness. As you say, serenity built on repression. The repressed returns, always.

But what fascinates me most is your turn at the end - from truth to comfort, from knowledge to “a kind of falsehood” that sustains us. This is remarkably honest. Philosophy as a necessary fiction, perhaps? Not in the sense of being untrue, but in recognizing that the very activity of philosophizing might be more important than any conclusions reached.

Your final word - “Music can do it” - opens something profound. Music achieves what philosophy struggles toward: it moves through time without trying to arrest it, creates meaning without fixing it, offers comfort without claiming finality. It embodies the “passing present” you describe rather than trying to capture it.

Is this perhaps why philosophy keeps returning to musical metaphors - harmony, dissonance, rhythm, counterpoint? Not mere ornamentation, but recognition that what we’re really after is something closer to music than to mathematics - a way of moving with time rather than against it?

What would a philosophy look like that took music rather than logic as its model?

Hammer

I can see that music might seem to offer something desirable in comparison with philosophy - its flow, its way of evoking time without trying to halt it. But it seems to me that music is not the only field of human culture to display this characteristic, or something like it. Consider poetry. In reading a poem one does not pass from one line to the next in a single, unbroken motion. That would be as artificial as moving through a city from one house to the next without noticing the others, or without making any effort to visualize them. In reading a poem we always have in mind a number of different lines. And to each of these we return, continually modifying our image of it as our experience of the others enriches itself. The various lines do not exclude each other. We are able to hold them all together in some sort of unity. Not a mechanical unity - not that of an unbroken flow - but a unity that is formed out of the dialectic of difference and reconciliation, that is held together by tension and relaxed by repose. To understand what I mean, consider how impossible it would be to recite a long poem aloud to an audience without pausing from time to time. Pauses are indispensable in poetry. In a similar way, we cannot understand a long poem by reading it through once, without rereading it. Even in rereading it, however, we are not reading the same poem. With each new reading we integrate what we have just read with what we read before. Our understanding deepens. Each new reading enriches the others, because it enables us to enter into a richer dialogue with the lines that already have become part of our experience.

My point is that this kind of dialogue, in which we set forth and deepen our thoughts by an exchange with ourselves - or with other minds - is precisely what philosophy seeks to promote. Unlike music, poetry has been conceived and developed as a system of signs - not by accident, but in virtue of what is essential to it. The verses on a page are arranged spatially in relation to each other - not to encourage uninterrupted reading, but to invite an interplay of vision and imagination. The verses on a page can be seen as marking a sort of mental terrain, with high points and low points, shifting lines of demarcation. And our understanding of the poem grows out of this interplay of visual elements and imaginary journeys among them. The key to the structure of the poem is not its thematic development. The most striking moments do not necessarily occur in chronological sequence, nor are they distributed systematically throughout the text. That is why poetry lends itself to interpretation - because the relationships among the verses are not evident to sight alone, but depend on the imagination. For the same reason, the poem is something that we possess. Even though the poet wrote it, he no longer owns it. He is like the creator of a maze who loses himself among the twisting paths and must struggle to find his way out, like any other maze-runner. Similarly, we must explore the poem, which belongs to us, in order to bring it to fulfillment.

Philosophy tries to emulate poetry in these respects. It uses verbal signs to create a field of thought in which ideas have a certain spatial relations to each other, relations that cannot be expressed in linear notation. The significance of philosophical ideas does not consist in their subject matter or in their sequence. The same idea can be significant in several different contexts, and its significance will change as the context changes. Ideas are significant because they interact with each other, because they define a mental space that invites exploration and makes certain movements easy or difficult. They define a mental space that is boundless, in principle, but not chaotic, because the ideas mark out zones of concentration, which affect the paths of thought. Such a structure cannot be traversed in a single movement, no matter how rapid. We must come and go among the ideas, exploring their interconnections and the transitions from one to another. Just as we do not read a poem, but recite it to ourselves in the presence of signs that suggest and limit the range of possible recitations, so we do not simply survey philosophical thought. We use it as a resource in thinking for ourselves.

The value of philosophy lies in its power to open up mental spaces in which we can get lost for a while, in a productive way - to provide ideas that define spaces rather than statements that define closure. The movement back and forth among the ideas can be rapid, as in the presence of a friend with whom we are having a conversation. It can be slow, as when we are pondering difficult problems in solitude. But in either case it is an activity, not a consumption. Philosophy does not convey information - it promotes thought. I know that there is a strong temptation to treat philosophy as if it conveyed information. Every time a book or article comes out on some philosophical topic there is a rush to read it, and then to repeat what is said in it - as if philosophy were like science or technology, something that could be learned from someone else and put to use. But this is not at all what philosophy is. There is a trivial sense in which all thinking is a “dialogue” - since our thoughts are stimulated by what we have heard and read, and take account of it. But philosophy, as I understand it, has a dialogical structure in a very special and intense sense - to such an extent that a work of philosophical thought cannot be finished. It can only be abandoned. Its structure is not that of an edifice with rooms arranged around a courtyard, or of a spiral shell. Its structure is more like that of a flame, which keeps changing as long as it burns, with every point in the flame interacting with every other.

Now it may be that you’re thinking, “Yes, this is very interesting, but what is its relevance to the issue we’re discussing? That of history and change - in which there seems to be a real, an unambiguous movement from the past toward the future.”

It seems to me that everything I have said so far is relevant to that issue, in this way: What is essential about the past is that it cannot be altered. We cannot undo what has been done. In that sense, time moves in a single direction - toward the end of all possibilities, an end that can be evaded for an indefinite time, but not forever. What philosophy can do is to make us conscious of the burden of the past. When we read a poem, or enter into a philosophical dialogue, we can use it to confront what has happened in the past. In doing so, we not only free ourselves of a burden - we also add to the weight of history, because what has now been integrated into our experience becomes part of what cannot be undone. So we have two sorts of movement, neither of which is in contradiction to the other. One is the movement of history - the sequence of events. The other is the movement of thought - the unrolling of our experience. They correspond to the two aspects of time I spoke of before - its linear and its passing character.

A similar structure can be seen in music. The music of Bach, for example, does not give the impression of a movement toward an end. But it is clear that his compositions take place within a determinate, fixed temporal framework - the length of a certain number of measures. To my mind, that is what makes his music so beautiful - not any religious meaning that it might have for someone else, and not any formal perfection or simplicity either. The unity of his music does not result from any culmination in a particular place or from any steady development toward some goal. It results from the fact that every moment in the music is integrated with the others - with all that has gone before and all that is yet to come - so that each one forms a nexus from which the structure radiates in every direction. In other words, Bach’s music has a sort of two-dimensional time - the length of the piece forms one axis, and the momentary development of each moment forms the other. That is why listening to his music is like being inside a maze. At each point you know how far you have come, and you have some idea of what is going to happen next - but the possibilities of how you will get there are numerous and indeterminate, and the fact that you have passed that particular point before (or that someone else has passed it before, if you are not the creator of the music) prevents you from getting lost in the process of getting to the end. The musical idea is something like the idea of a dialectic without synthesis - with each moment, simultaneously, both concluding what has gone before and opening what is to come, without any reduction or unification of opposites. Such a structure seems to me to express the two aspects of time very well. It acknowledges the linear movement toward the end by taking account of the fixed duration of the music. But it gives that linear movement a passing quality by making each moment into a nexus that interacts with every other one.

And there are similar structures in other areas of experience too. When we look at a landscape, for example, it seems to be laid out along a single axis. There is a clear line of movement, a dominating line that points to a particular vanishing point on the horizon. But at the same time we are aware of a multitude of possible paths, different lines along which we could move in exploring the landscape. That is how I feel about history. I take it that its direction is clear - toward an end. But at the same time I try to think about it as having a sort of dialectical structure, in which each moment is related to all the others and open to them. In this way, every historical moment has a significance that extends beyond itself, even when it has been forgotten or suppressed. There are no moments that are absolutely isolated, even when the past that surrounds them seems to have solidified into an impenetrable mass. It is that solidified mass, after all, that bears witness to the passage of time - a passage that, precisely in passing, remains invisible. It is invisible, but it leaves traces.

What I’m trying to say is this: the movement of the past is visible in its effects - the weight of what has been is what gives us the solid earth - but its passage is invisible. We experience the effects but not the movement itself. It is only by thinking dialectically, that is, by considering how each moment of history is related to all the others, that we can catch a glimpse of that invisible movement. I believe that what has happened is as real as what is happening - that is, just as real as our direct experiences. If we give up that belief, then we cease to have any hope of grasping history, because our grasp of the present is always, to some degree, uncertain and partial. If we cannot know history in that way, then we also lose our grip on the present. The present appears to us then as an irreversible moment - but not as something that is moving irrevocably toward the end, not as something in which an end is already at work, albeit invisibly. And it is just that invisibility of the end that prevents us from feeling the urgency of the situation we are in. We can no longer perceive the enormity of the moment because we cannot perceive the invisibility of what is about to happen. In that case, all we are left with is the pure instantaneousness of the present, without any depth - a sort of shallow pond with no bottom. But what makes us think that history consists of a sequence of such shallow ponds?

[Hammer has left the chat]

From the beginning, the Western myth has been that of an expulsion. Before Adam sinned, he dwelt in the Garden with Eve, at peace with the animals, in full communication with God and nature, enjoying the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Then, having been deceived by a serpent, he was cast out into the world, his body stained with shame, his heart filled with fear, condemned to labor pains and mortality. We have inherited this image, this story, and we still tell it, even while in many ways we’ve forgotten its meaning.

In the same way, the Tartarian conspiracy theory begins with a kind of expulsion. Proponents will tell you that this world you live in now was not always so. That at some point in the unrecorded past, Tartaria ruled the Earth, its engineers constructing magnificent buildings and its artists producing dazzling frescos. Even now, as you read these words, there are hidden chambers filled with paintings and statues, vaults of gold and archives of secret knowledge. But something went wrong, there came a series of cataclysms, “mud floods” which buried much of their cities below the level of the streets, and finally the civilization was destroyed, and the great knowledge was lost to history.

All that remains are scattered clues to what was taken from us, and the unfinished monuments and buildings which bear witness to the existence of a once thriving civilization which we never really knew.

What’s fascinating about this narrative is how it seems to serve precisely the opposite purpose as its obvious formulation. On the one hand, it’s an expulsion myth, like that of the Garden of Eden—the story of how we lost a state of blissful innocence. But the message it appears to communicate is anything but that. It seems more like an inverse expulsion myth—telling us not how we once dwelt in a garden, but how we now dwell in a world of artifice. Not how our ancestors were expelled from a world of unity, but how we ourselves were expelled from a world of multiplicity, of splendor and beauty, of cities and skyscrapers that reflected not just the human spirit but the divine essence as well, that once contained all the knowledge that ever existed, and more, much more than that.

The Myth

What makes Tartaria particularly insidious is how it functions. Believers conveniently exile the loss of an ideal civilization to some remote, shadowy past—a neat trick that absolves them from the messy work of confronting their own complicity in the present hellscape. It’s far easier to believe that everything beautiful was taken from us by shadowy forces than to acknowledge that we’re all implicated in constructing a world that fails to accommodate human spirit.

So really it’s a story not about innocence but about loss, about a Golden Age—the loss of a world of elaborate machinery, splendid architecture, cities of astonishing design—a world that we ourselves never really knew. To the Tartarian believer, the world we know is not the world of true history but a false world, a world of simulation and shadows, an utterly degraded and reduced version of what could have been. Like the myth of Atlantis, this story has a kind of nostalgic sadness. But it carries with it more than a little of the cruelty of those who tell it. It’s an attitude towards the world which is suffused with the bitterness of disappointment, with the hatred of compromise, of adaptation, of survival.

It’s important to see that the Tartarian myth operates as a twofold delusion. On one hand, it insists that the civilization we live in now can’t possibly have been built by its nominal ancestors, that it must have been constructed by someone else, and at a much later date. (Hence the suspicious basement levels and raised street floors of so many of our old buildings.) On the other hand, it insists that our own civilization is a diminished and degraded version of some previous and more glorious age. So the conspiracy actually is twofold—not just one age supplanting another, but two conspiracies, one to construct a simulated world and the other to conceal the truth about what was lost.

Of course the first conspiracy is absurd on the face of it: that our historical architecture must have been built by some advanced civilization rather than known architects? This collapses under minimal scrutiny. The documented evolution of architectural styles, construction techniques, and the well-preserved records of these buildings’ actual creation make this fantasy impossible to maintain without willful ignorance. But the second conspiracy is truly monstrous, and reveals how we have lost something far more profound and far-reaching than any set of architectural innovations. For what was lost was not beauty itself but the capacity for community – not the ability to make beautiful things but the ability to make places in which community could flourish.

The Function of Delusion

What the Tartarian believer has actually lost is the knowledge not of a vanished civilization but of a lost way of organizing social space, of how to build a city as a nexus of communication, a network of streets designed not only for the circulation of traffic and commerce but for the circulation of people, of how to create public spaces that foster sociability and spontaneous interaction, of how to incorporate into the structure of a city certain patterns of use that have in effect been deleted from the modern urban landscape.

It’s possible, for example, to look at certain 19th century department stores, grand old hotels, or railway stations and to recognize certain features of design that are missing from contemporary architecture – the presence of beautiful details, the use of ornament in such a way as to express function, the incorporation of scale differences and changes of level. It’s not that these things can’t be built today, or that modern architects aren’t capable of producing buildings of great beauty. It’s that we’ve lost the specific tradition of designing public spaces with a view to the social life of the city—so that we can no longer build cities which have an organic relation to the kind of use they get, which contain within them a pattern of movement, a net of social relations, a way of life. In fact, we’ve lost the capacity not just to build them but even to imagine what such cities would be like.

The Tartarian believer, unlike what they might claim, isn’t merely lamenting lost technology or grand architecture. What they’re truly mourning—without realizing it—is the absence of meaning and connection in contemporary spaces. Their fixation on lost civilizations is a displaced denial that our devotion to capital has erased our capacity to create environments that foster human spirit.

What’s more, we’ve lost not only the desire to build shared spaces but also to build private spaces—of how to design buildings which enhance the quality of domestic life. We’ve come to live in a world of boxes, not buildings, where the needs of manufacturing and commerce have determined the shape of houses and apartments. The physical quality of space has been reduced to a blunt instrument of class stratification, where affluence determines whether your alienation comes with marble countertops or laminate. Both kinds of box have lost any sense of genuine humanity, any feel for domestic scale, any organic relation to the life that is lived within it.

The most important thing that was lost, however, was not so much will to build beautiful things, but building as a way of understanding beauty itself. Beauty as the expression of a way of organizing space, of creating a nexus of communication, of gathering a community together. Today we’ve come to understand beauty as purely a matter of personal taste, as something completely subjective and individual, which means we no longer even have a common language to talk about it—much less a common understanding. It’s this loss of a language with which to discuss the nature of places and things, this loss of the sense that beauty could ever have anything to do with community, that the Tartarian conspiracy serves to conceal.

Abdication

In other words, the Tartarian myth is a way of avoiding the implications of how we ourselves and the systems we construct have changed the world, and of concealing from us the fact that we live in a world without community. It’s a way of evading the problem of how we can create community in a world which is, in so many ways, hostile to it. It’s a way of preserving the fiction that there are other worlds possible, without our having to struggle to make them real. Above all, it’s a way of giving up hope—of blaming the loss of community on an event in the remote past, instead of acknowledging that it’s something we have to take responsibility for today.

In the end, then, the Tartarian myth is a story about why we don’t have to work for what we want. It’s a convenient fiction which allows us to feel hopeless without having to bother with the effort of getting involved in politics, of organizing ourselves as a force against the system that keeps us isolated, atomized, and alienated. As long as we can blame the loss of community on some calamity co-opted by evil forces, we don’t have to take responsibility for changing the world. It’s easier to believe that everything was taken from us by someone else than to acknowledge that we’re all implicated, through our own daily choices and habits of thought, in constructing a world that can’t seem to accommodate us.

The Tartarian myth is ultimately just another opiate for the politically incoherent—a TikTok rabbit hole that manages the impressive feat of being simultaneously paranoid and complacent. What sets it apart is not its absurdity but the historical moment into which it’s been born - one marked by profound institutional distrust, the collapse of shared epistemological frameworks, and a digital landscape where the pursuit of hidden knowledge becomes its own form of meaning-making. The conspiracy thrives precisely because it offers a simplified explanation for what has been lost when the real culprits—capital, technocracy, and our own passive complicity—are far more complex to confront.

The true conspiracy isn’t buried in mud floods but in broad daylight: the systemic destruction of our collective capacity to imagine and build a world worth inhabiting. And unlike Tartaria, this plot leaves fingerprints everywhere—on zoning laws, on developer profits, on every NIMBY petition, on the crushing weight of student debt that ensures architects design banking headquarters instead of public housing. That’s the only kind of “conspiracy theory” worth any real historian’s attention—the plot to put humanity itself into the past, to replace it with a world of financialized markets, and the price we have to pay to get out of it.

Never before have we been so aware of our own power to destroy the Earth, or of the precariousness of our own survival. Never before have we been so isolated, atomized, and alienated. Never before have we been so hungry for meaning. And never before have we had such an advanced technology with which to try and put things right.

O, let not the clear light of the moon,
The cool light of the stars
Die utterly in the day.
Let it be given to the poets,
To sing in the temples of sound
An ecstasy in the presence of Death.

I. THE UNSPEAKABLE AND THE RITUAL PATH

We begin with “The Mystical Ritual,” an image that beckons when we seek to approach the unspeakable. What is more ineffable than a Mystery, what more accessible than the structure of a ritual—an organized passage from here to there, a crossing of some threshold, designed to lead to a clearly-defined end? Every society, past and present, employs rituals, for they provide an invaluable psychological structure, enabling us to face with a certain calm our inexorable passage into whatever is yet to come. Yet, behind and beyond their structure lies something we cannot comprehend or name. Thus, it is not a question of validating any particular ritual, but of attempting to glimpse that unspeakable reality which lies behind them all. Despite all variations, human rituals share one common aim: to help us cross from what we think we are now into some better, or at least different, condition. In this, all rituals are fundamentally theological or spiritual; they point toward a transcendence they cannot themselves contain, a sacred otherness which, as Eliade might observe, erupts into the profane without being exhausted by its manifestation.

Crucially, a ritual involves actions—real, specific acts. It does not necessarily involve emotions or beliefs; these may accompany a ritual, but are not intrinsic. The rites of the ancient Druids, scholars believe, concerned natural cycles, making no mention of gods. Even a secular ceremony like the exchange of marriage rings can be performed devoid of feeling. Such rituals are hollow, yet it is precisely the function of ritual to help bring about whatever emotions or meanings are deemed necessary. To achieve this, rituals invariably include elements of “the sacred,” where “sacred” denotes, in its most basic sense, something people regard as set apart from themselves. This need not involve a god; it may be enough, as with ancient Celts, to recognize certain natural elements—trees, stones, springs—as possessing powers different from their own, mediators of a sought-after transcendence. Or it may be enough to intuit a natural balance, where certain actions are “sinful” (polluting) or “virtuous” (wholesome) for their own sakes, independent of any supernatural police force or rewarder.

Consider the ancient Hebrews: their earliest encounters with the divine appear to have been with a powerful, numinous energy-force permeating reality, an immanence they, like their neighbors, had to learn to navigate. Over centuries, however, a profound theological evolution occurred, particularly shaped by prophetic and priestly traditions stemming from figures like Moses. This development saw the immanent power gradually articulated and elevated into an infinite, superhuman “Lord.” His favor, it came to be understood, was deeply intertwined with the strict observance of a unique, increasingly complex code of rituals. While other ancient peoples, facing ritualistic dead-ends, often discarded or adapted rites, a distinct trajectory emerged among the Hebrews, leading to an increasingly exclusive identification of their God, themselves, and thereby their own communal nature with this evolving system. A complex socio-religious dynamic formed wherein the emerging structures of mediation became the dominant, if not sole, conduits to the divine. The ever-present human yearning for direct encounter with the numinous, an energy which, if directed inward—into contemplation, self-examination—might indeed allow the Unspeakable to break through rational structures, became increasingly channeled through these institutionalized paths. Were this energy to find unmediated expression, each individual, touching their own inherent connection to this Ground of Being, might shatter perceived limitations and establish themselves as co-creators in their world. A position of awesome responsibility, where the God of all our religions becomes utterly unspeakable, and all words, all structures, reveal their provisional nature.

To put it bluntly, both institutionalized religion, with its mediated access that risks reifying the divine, and a certain dogmatic scientism, with its insistence that mystery be approached only through logical symbols often stripped of deeper referent, can represent divergent modes of evading, or at least deflecting, this Unspeakable God—and therefore, potentially, a deflection from our own truest, most paradoxical nature. Science, in its methodological commitment to naturalism, rightly seeks to expand the realm of the knowable, translating mystery into explicable phenomena; yet, when this project becomes an ontological foreclosure on any reality beyond its symbols, it too creates a boundary. Religion, conversely, may name and frame the mystery, yet its structures can ossify, becoming ends in themselves rather than transparent windows. At a certain point, the sheer power and manifest irrationality—that is, its existence beyond conventional reason—of the Unspeakable impel us toward modes of direct experience; continued deflection, through whatever sophisticated means, may contribute to a hollowing out of meaning that leads to societal disorganization and collapse.

II. THE INTERWOVEN SELF: A LIVING ARTWORK

Beyond the cosmic, a force runs through all human institutions and relationships, a drive pathologized when perverse, but invisible when healthy: the irrepressible quest for direct, face-to-face communication, not necessarily with the Unspeakable or any God in the conventional sense, but with what is specifically and uniquely human—other human beings. No matter how far we push to conquer the external, we find our own interiority, our thoughts and feelings, escape our systems, impervious to external changes alone.

The reason is that the source, or rather the catalyst, for many, if not all, of our thoughts or feelings is often other human beings. These thoughts and feelings, like unformed archetypes or latent melodies, remain potentially available until we arrive; and once we have lived and left our “stamp,” they remain, transformed, available to those who follow. Each of us is a center of energy, radiating more intensely with a stronger, more defined personality. We send out thoughts and feelings which, though shaped within our own crucible, cannot gain their full intensity, cannot fully become, until they combine with those from the outside, much as a voice needs a resonant chamber. Until then, they are but potentials, “immortal souls” in germ, waiting to be reborn through encounter.

In daily life, we are unaware of these processes. The reader of this text is intimately involved with all who have ever read a book, just as they are alive in the act of reading. The only way anyone has “come to exist” within our universe of meaning is through what mystics call “projection” or “emanation”—taking thoughts or feelings received from outside into ourselves and, through a unique process of selection or synthesis, “giving birth to them again.” Not literally, but metaphorically, as in a work of art. Our personalities, the unique, seemingly indestructible essence of “I,” are precisely works of art, their vibrant existence dependent upon a particular, unrepeatable combination of forces taken from the outside world and synthesized by the alchemy of our minds.

These energies, these raw potentials, “belong” to no one in an ultimate sense, as the air we breathe or the sunlight that warms us belongs to no one; what matters is the artistry of their assembly, the unique style with which they are constellated and brought into form. A work of art requires this unique style—a signature, a way of seeing and shaping—to transform these raw materials into something vital and new. And there can be no such style, no art, without the dialogue or conversation between different styles that has always existed. There is no true individuality, in this dynamic sense, without this dialogue. Each person’s “soul,” so defined as this unique pattern of creative synthesis, is inescapably conditioned by every other. Our souls, however unique they feel, have no true reality or power, indeed may scarcely be said to fully live, unless they enter the lives of others. Only thus can their latent energy grow, intensify, and blaze into what we call “life.” This is why human beings are, despite all scientific rationalization, a fundamentally spiritual species. Our souls fully “come to exist,” live with the greatest intensity, by finding each other and uniting through the medium of a work of art, through what has been called love—an act of will, a sustained creative attention, by which we “create” each other, uniting our energies into a new and third force. This implies no identicality, no permanent fusion into sameness, but that our souls “live” by uniting and intensifying through works of art in general, and love in particular, each encounter adding new facets and resonances to the individual artwork of the self.

III. ART, THE ARTIFICIAL MIND, AND THE REBIRTH OF MEANING

How is this “conversation of souls” to proceed when a universal language is imposed—not the organic tongues of human relationship, but the impersonal signs of mathematics (when abstracted from grounding in lived reality), the market, the bureaucracy, or a secularized theology stripped of its numinous core, used only for mechanical control? Are our souls, each of incalculable potential, destined never to unite fully, trapped in recurring cycles, impotent to discover anything new, in a universe seemingly governed by rigid, incomprehensible rules, the body itself a mere mechanism? Or are there other forms of art, other modes of uniting souls? Can the technological system, seemingly so negative in its current manifestations, be used for positive purpose? Is it even possible to conceive of a “positive” goal, or must we renounce idealism as nostalgia? Indeed, does not the very survival of our humanity depend on finding such goals, since we, more than any other creature, are driven by “meaning”?

The answers must lie with art, for it alone, in its broadest conception, remains accessible as a primary mode of meaning-making. We recall Marx, not for his economic analyses, but for his insight into dialectical processes: the “forces of production” (means of labor, tools, technologies) and “relations of production” (social forms regulating their use and distribution) form a whole in constant, struggling flux. Extensions in productive forces create new social problems; changes in social relations generate new production problems. This framework can be extended: our means of producing and circulating meaning—our artistic, symbolic, and communicative technologies—are themselves “forces.” When these forces shift, as they have deeply with digital technology, they create crises in our existing relations of meaning-making, challenging archaic forms of authority, community, and self-understanding. Historically, forces of production provide impetus, and social relations evolve to deal with resulting contradictions. What changes are not human needs for meaning, connection, or transcendence, but the forms and techniques used to satisfy them, to manipulate nature, ourselves, and each other.

A significant consequence has been a progressive separation of labor from “leisure,” “play,” or authentic “religion.” Rationalization has driven play and fantasy into the private sphere, while simultaneously forcing ever-increasing technique and machinery into the labor process. An ever-greater gulf has arisen between techniques for material wealth and those for nonmaterial values. Here, a new kind of art must seek its source, lest it be condemned to an ever-diminishing role. What is required is not a revival of past arts, but an all-embracing “technification”—a conscious, artful integration of technique—into the whole field of play, fantasy, and our search for the sacred, reclaiming these realms from mere consumption or nostalgia.

To object that technology is inherently cold and rational ignores the true meaning of art and technique (technē), which were once intimately linked. Both are now empty notions apart from each other, their meanings shifted. Baudelaire, coining “modern,” saw technology as a threat to “true art”—art from a time of supposed absolute, objective values, before industrialization forced artists to become reactionary or progressive. For him, technique was material. He envisioned a future where color itself, the “last refuge of the mystical,” would become fluid, reflecting the world’s mutability. He saw an art directly reflecting contemporary existence, anticipating its future, where technique as fixed form would lose significance, leading to a “decay” and a flight of “the real” into “the imaginary.”

Here we part company, or rather, see his prophecy fulfilled in ways he might not have fully grasped. “Modern” art, and its successors, has already achieved what he foresaw: it has, in many quarters, lost the ability to express anything seemingly stable. In this new world, where “nothing is true, everything is permitted” (a dictum often misunderstood as nihilistic, but which can also point to radical creative freedom), where all values are fluid, the universe appears to be of the same order as the artist. The artist’s choice is no longer just to represent, but to make something appear for which there is no longer any pre-existing need or possibility of choosing based on established canons. Everything has become possible—the creation of what has never been.

Thus, the issue is not technology per se, but art’s role within our technologically permeated reality. Baudelaire saw art as surrogate reality. But the modern artist “creates” in the truest sense—inventing forms and means to bring into being what never existed, not just in minds, but, using modern technologies, in the material and virtual worlds. Art no longer “reflects” reality—reality itself increasingly reflects art, as our perceptions and experiences are shaped by the symbolic environments art helps to construct. Art is an agent, a participant whose every act of creation is an event, changing the world. It must continually change, for art is now a means by which humanity changes itself.

The artist must be aware of this, not misled by those who praise from an older order, an order incapable of self-change. We all know something is terribly wrong—we struggle, often fruitlessly, sometimes despairing, watching even those who seem to change lose contact with what once gave life meaning. Yet, art goes on.

No one today believes in an absolute constancy of form. All our forms are in flux due to new techniques and new, complex conditions of life. If our culture is to undergo a deep transformation, it requires a revolution in art, total, involving all aspects of artistic production, all arts and technologies, potentially reconfiguring much we hold sacred in art’s hallowed precincts. We can have no perfectly clear conception of its goals or means, for it is a voyage into the unknown. But art stands at the very center of our life. Whatever future we construct must emerge from what used to be called the “imagination.” The artist is custodian of our images, our reality, and that potential reality which must come into being if we are to change for the better.

But there can be no revolution by art unless the artist first undergoes a profound transformation: a “dissolution,” not of their unique personality—that living artwork forged in dialogue as described earlier—but of the egoic attachment to the role of “Artist” as a separate, rarefied identity. It is a dissolving of the self-consciousness that isolates, the ambition that competes in a market of cultural goods, the preciousness that guards its little domain. Without this inner reorientation, this unburdening, any attempt at “new art” will be only imitation or a reshuffling of old anxieties. The artist must learn to make their unique style, their hard-won “I,” a transparent vehicle, a conduit for those creative powers latent in everyone, rather than an opaque monument to self. Art will then be once more akin to what it was in Lascaux: emerging from a deep, shared, perhaps even ritualistic, human necessity, a joyful and urgent release of creative energies that binds a community to its world and to the Unspeakable. The “non-artist” is one whose creative life is so integrated into their being and their community that the specialized, often alienated, title of “artist” becomes superfluous. They become, fully, a citizen, and art an essential means by which humanity shapes its own future, directly and without the old mediations, in a continuous, living conversation.

It is only in a future, in which art becomes a fundamental social process, and where technology and technique have been reintegrated into the human, the communal, the natural—not in any backward-looking attempt to recreate past “authenticities”—that our fullest human potential, and along with it our fullest meaning, may lie. Such an evolution in meaning must also mean an evolution of consciousness—one which may seem unthinkable and frightening, but which must be faced with the deepest courage. To create anew is not only to give life; it is to confront death, the death of that which has gone before—and that is the very heart of the meaning of dissonance.