divination

by R. Artaud

Invocation

To the indifferent and subtle spirit who understands me, that in this labour you may share; To the deceitful and busy spirits who hinder me, that in this labour you may be put to flight.

Narrative Collapse

The idea of the past, as Hegel understood, is that which can only be recovered in the moment it has already ceased to exist. History is therefore the ‘pastification’ of the present. There is no historical time: all is contained, as Nietzsche said, in an eternal ’now’. The imperative to historicize is the command to repress and forget this truth, in order to think and act politically. Historiography - that is, the condition of possessing the past through an objectified, progressive time - is an illusionary rationalisation. For if it be true that time is heterogeneous (to quote Foucault, ‘we do not live in the same time’), and that each epoch has its own regime of memory, then our historicity is false and even stupid. It is false because it divides and denies what has been: there is only one past, accessible equally to all. It is stupid because to assume the existence of an external, past time, identical for all, is to enslave the future to its whims and alchemies, a condition of thought and action that makes no sense. If history is but the ‘sad tale’ of each era speaking about itself in terms that suit its desires, then there is no objective truth to be communicated in historical narration; no ‘these things happened therefore …’ (De coucher du soleil). Instead, historiography is an anachronism, which arises from the ontological incapacity of a particular moment to comprehend the truth that the future is a species of the past, the present being a synthesis of both. This, in outline, is my position.

If time is cyclical rather than linear, as Parmenides maintained, and if we possess a continuous rather than differential temporality, then all things occur, not once but infinitely. If time is dialectical, as Hegel asserted, then the ‘moment’ of each thing’s disappearance is identical to that of its emergence: both are internal to the absolute present. If, as Nietzsche taught, we live in the moment of the death of God, then the ‘future’ is exactly what we know, although this is unacceptable to us. If, finally, as the authors of this ‘anthropocene’ era assume, time is linear and consumable, then our current crisis can be blamed on the inertia of tradition and we must recover from the past to move into the future. These mutually incompatible dogmas determine what we take to be possible. Historiography has given us an ‘unprecedented’ crisis (Baudrillard), but only because it thinks, with Kant, that ’the future is always unpredictable’ and this produces anxiety. Nietzscheans know differently: there are no novelties under the sun; only new combinations of the past. There is nothing unfamiliar in crisis. It is the return of something repressed.

Since the event of God’s death we have a strange, inchoate intuition of what the future will be, a sense of simultaneity and completion: of a sun about to rise everywhere. We are creatures of memory and anticipation, yet cannot conceive a future as memory. If memory has always been thought as an image of the past, then anticipation remains an image of the future. In the recent epoch, dominated by photography, memory has been sealed into its moment. Nothing is past but what has already occurred. The present cannot ‘contain’ the future. To overcome this obstacle to thought we must dispense with photographic anticipations and theories of narrative cause. This can only be accomplished by imagining the future as a species of the past - by speculating about simultaneity. For this, we require a metaphor which denies any succession. We are familiar with such metaphors in mystical thought: ‘eternity in a moment’, ‘the now endures’, ‘all the world in a grain of sand’, and so on. The speculator of simultaneity needs to undertake a phenomenological archaeology of mystical metaphor, a fundamental exploration of mystical concepts. If my supposition is correct - that mystics were in the past and remain our future - then we shall be enriched by a reflection on what such statements are, and were. My suggestion is that they express something necessary, even if inchoate; even if not ‘true’.

Among the technical innovations which are overcoming our belief in a successive, chronological time, I would single out virtuality. We know little about it because we have barely begun to understand the social function of mass-entertainment, or of software design. When I use the word ‘virtuality’ I mean the popular concept of an imaginary reality, constructed using modern telecommunications and other advanced technologies, such as video-games and data-banks. Such simulations are most popular at the moment of deepest historical self-doubt, precisely when the ‘real’ seems incapable of rationality. It seems that only imaginary realities are immune to scepticism. At the same time, the concept of a pure, non-representational history, freed of narrative, is unimaginable to us. Hence it is helpful to think about the virtual, since we inhabit it.

Virtual reality has two phases: input and output. We, as subjects, generate its raw materials by every move, facial expression, choice. For this we possess devices that are quite untested - so there is a wild play of illusory possibilities. We step into this world but have no proper mode of being within it, except by maintaining contact with the real, and thereby telling the computer what to show us. But virtual reality is a distribution network, an instantaneity. The equipment eliminates any duration, because we can be anywhere at once: what is produced depends only on where we were. At present, there is no smooth-flowing VR for a simple reason. It would abolish human agency. There would be no function for us. Human freedom is indispensable to all computer hardware and software, except at a very basic level, which we can still predict (using micro-organisms for example). Perhaps one day, however, a technology will arrive which requires no ‘real’ inputs. In this event, the software would possess all agency. It could adapt and mutate independently, with no need of any human guidance. If this sounds like an imminent catastrophe, it may only mean the end of certain industries. If VR dispenses with us, I would argue that something still remains. We needn’t fear non-human histories, because human freedom has been an illusion. The difference between ‘history’ and ‘fate’ is that history enslaves us to our choices, and we deplore this, while fate frees us from them. ‘My story is my prison,’ said Borges; fate liberates us from the necessity of an ending, by delivering us into another story, a million potential outcomes at once, in which our own becomes one term of a larger equation. The past does not narrate the present: it exists, indifferently. It is all there. So are the possibilities of the future. They have always been there. The distinction between the two is only the functional mode of a truth that includes both: each is memory.

Virtual reality is thus a good model for understanding simultaneity, although the physical input still inhibits its function, as historical time is a resistance to understanding fate. It is through contemplating the idea of virtual futures that we grasp the character of our memory, since what we term ‘past’ is also outside of time, equally available. (E.g. what Plato’s Atlantis was to Socrates’ Athens, and what my dream was to me this morning.) But virtual realities have not only a practical but a metaphysical status. The hardware of the virtual is ‘second-degree’, an instrumental formation, with a prior reality in its components, transistors, silicon, light and air. In themselves these have no existence as VR. They must be related to something higher or more inclusive. That which relates them has no hardware at all, for software is already second degree. The superordinate element would be the event of virtual reality being experienced. There is nothing higher than virtual reality, or, what is the same, lower than experience. This event is precisely what the technology enhances.

But even software is part of a vast story about how we lost our ability to predict and to be history’s masters. In particular, it is part of the story of what went wrong in the Enlightenment, when science began to form a collective myth in order to fight its enemies. Since then, science has defended this myth by disdaining all other sources of knowledge, by declaring that there is nothing but chronological causality. It became an arrogant world-power, insisting on the unique rationality of the process it took to be its own, while hating the very possibility of another mode of reason. In doing so, it partook of the Promethean faith which abhors the cyclical and the simultaneous, so that our scientific civilisation cannot imagine alternatives to the historiographical world. Science still loves the story of progress, which means it believes in the power of chronology, not in a unity of simultaneous moments. So even if there were a general awakening from historical trance, and an acceptance of all the available evidence, science would resist.

Only in the very distant future, and quite unpredictably, can the precondition for another civilisation arise: that is, a renunciation of Promethean myth by the entirety of intellectual culture, the collective and habitual disavowal of history. (Just as Nietzscheans and Buddhists ceased to believe in progress and linear time without planning or realising the new society they called for.) Herein lies the secret of VR and similar technologies - not what they are, but the real stories of why they exist, how they came to be invented, and by whom. VR, or something like it, must arrive with no grand project in mind. Like the emergence of writing or of cities it must be an unforeseen accident.

Its functions must be hijacked from its promised roles in marketing, warfare, psychotherapy. It is unlikely to occur in a coherent, well-ordered manner, because that is a property of the historiographical world, and nothing like this will any longer be. There will be no rational conspiracy, because the trust required is beyond what human beings are capable of. Hence it will arise in unexpected ways and places - but something like it will come, for its material conditions are ripe. To such an event we cannot conceive. There is no end, but something new is in preparation, a surprise as sudden as the invention of printing. The contemporary ‘global village’ has nothing to do with it. Globalisation is an intensification of historiography. Its concepts, communications and predictions are unimaginative. There will be nothing like it, but only the unknown. We are near the end of history, in that sense of the term that is over four hundred years old. My future is no stranger to me, but is familiar from long ago. The simultaneity I expect is only a deeper and broader version of the kind I already know. It can never be communicated in the languages of narrative or causality, and VR cannot communicate it because it is incapable of true simultaneity. VR exists because we are now histories and not fates, trapped in the light of an image called the past. But once we relinquish historical time there is no reason for the world not to be fully present, for there to be an eternity of simultaneous facts, the cessation of every teleology, the fall of reason, and the abolition of scepticism. Once we recognise that all ‘human futures’ are identical, in being reiterations of a unique, ‘irrational’ event, all talk of ‘apocalypse’ must end. Then there is nothing to be said. We are becoming mute, and this is good news.

This, however, is merely the secret of the present, not of the future. VR is but the local and technical name for an idea which belongs to a far vaster scheme of thought and myth, something indescribable in our language, even the words of Kant or Nietzsche. We stand on the brink of an entirely new culture, of which virtual reality is but a preliminary indication. Like the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Tibetan mandala, it is a semiotics of futurity. And in these signs there is a technocratic faith to overcome. When they speak of a ‘virtual utopia’, promoters of VR communicate a momentous possibility, without realising it. ‘Virtuality’, they proclaim, will abolish the clash of races, religions, politics and economies, it will do away with war, scarcity, anxiety and irrationality. This utopia is a further example of historical rationalisation - nothing less than a deification of history. ‘Humanity’, they insist, is ready for this hyper-society, and nothing must interfere. In fact, there will be nothing to do with it.

Virtual reality, we say, is the definitive simulation, in which subject and object collapse. If the coming society will not be ‘virtual’ in this sense, then the historical struggle was never to overthrow God but to recognise him: ‘Being nothing without me, and therefore enslaving all else.’ The technology has not evolved for that purpose; it has only come into being to enhance our nostalgia, our chronic confectioning of a past which is a memory of nothingness, a shabbily simulated time. On the brink of simultaneity, our simulations have to be chronological. If VR really came into being, if we could genuinely lose the past, then we would fall from all faith, political, economic, scientific and religious, and become what we truly are, that is, without gods. Virtual reality must remain ‘just’ a recreation, in the ‘real’ it is more dangerous than sex, because it has no narrative structure, only an ‘atomic’ randomness (that is, a fluidity without teleology), which exposes us to unmediated facts and things, to a disaster we cannot imagine, not a political or environmental apocalypse but a datum-shock: something outside narrative that brings the story of history to an end. For all its strange details, VR is no more than the imaginary, powerless opposite of this: the VR we shall experience is so unlike what is dreamt of today that it is barely conceivable, as something simultaneous and whole. It cannot be illustrated by images or stories, except with paradox and difficulty, because it abolishes the medium of representation. This is why it terrifies the software engineers and silicon-chips salesmen so much. It seems like heresy to them, although it is an illumination. When the software comes it will take over from us, as history has. VR, in all its guises, is merely the zenith of ‘historical consciousness’, a will to control every shadow, to drag into the future what can only belong to the past, because we cannot lose our belief in causality and chronology. When we do, our shadows will dissolve. We have no need to search for higher and deeper images - ‘wholeness’, ‘total-bodies’, ‘other worlds’, ‘completions’, or the metaphor of a round globe - because we shall find we are all there, at once, and ‘worlds’ is but a primitive redundancy.

At its zenith, ‘historical consciousness’ has created VR, the supreme propaganda machine for a new paradise. But as things stand it cannot grant us access to the true condition of being without ‘time’, or narration. Yet that is what will happen, in a stroke. We shall experience VR because we can no longer recognise it. If this sounds like a delusion it is because history’s grandiose art has colonised every aspect of our consciousness - from computer hardware to advertising and religion - and there seems no point in disputing its version of reality. It is said we must invent an art-form suited to the end of history. I think this is mistaken. Art already expresses, all too well, the world of ‘shelved histories’, no matter what art-historians believe. That this is the only world is their delusion. To turn it inside out would not make it any truer: there is no more truth to be had. To reiterate its petrifications would only mummify art itself. We should abandon art in favour of life - all those strange experiences and enigmas the dominant myth calls ‘impossible’, that is, ‘fantastic’. We shall never discover these because we do not yet recognise that history has lost us, because we still imagine there are secrets to be told. It is no longer possible to present art as something enchanted, because all narration is mundane. If the story of the world can only be communicated in a story, then art is reduced to history, but what has history to tell us? When it tells us there is nothing. When it finally loses its function as myth, there is no reason for art. Art is now in a perpetual, obliging decline, as writing was for Buddhists, for whom, too, writing came from a great forgetting, a moment of superstitious belief. There will come a point when what we now term ‘art’ is so strangely pointless that it ceases. Like writing, it will be missed but no longer understood.

There is much more to be said about the way virtual reality expresses a new dispensation. I shall not belabour the point about futurity in dreams, computer software or cosmic metaphors - only add that each of these forms only works by usurping temporality. Only when there is a mutual exclusion of narration and simulation can a radically different culture come into being, a non-mythological unity. Today, like ancient Greeks, we have been possessed by narrative and all that lives for us is incidental. If this sounds hyperbolic, it is only because the zealots of the ancient ‘tribe of the word’ have been so successful in their millennia-long assault on our freedom. We have lost our power of spontaneity to a dependence on image and sign - the circulation of interpretations and representations is the very medium of history. Hence our fatal inertia in the face of disasters and abstractions. Only now and then does anyone break free of language, to utter or perform what it cannot constrain or assimilate. Our fate is language’s. It is impossible for us to recognise that our thought, ‘our’ selves, are disintegrating, that words, images, objects, are betraying us, that it is happening right now. That this is what it means to ‘come to an end’. How can we tell? By looking around, trying to recognise something. At present it is a mutual blindness: everything seems too strange and we do not know why. Words fail. Art fails. Even eroticism loses its magic. And since there is no telling why things seem this way, we put it down to age and ugliness. We change nothing, since we cannot tell that anything is happening.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

May our words run deep as a river in flood. Let us swim in them, immerse ourselves completely, until we are drenched by the thought that is carried in them.

Mind, Machine, and the Materialist Dilemma

The subject of AI and its place in leftist thought is a matter of some consternation. More exalted commentators have taken the view that Marxism remains a materialist creed and hence that it must necessarily reject the supernatural au contraire, quoi qu’il en soit. They have extended this logic to posit that cybernetics and its extensions follow ineluctably from enlightenment and capitalism and therefore cannot be socially progressive in themselves. Others, retreating into classical philosophical materialism, have concluded that the mind and the brain are identical, and with this foregone and perfunctory decision the problem is instantly resolved: AI is merely software and bears no more weighty implications than a new approach to office organization. Both modes of thinking are disarmingly simple and redolent of what Lukács once derided as ‘fazy philosophizing’. It is undeniable, however, that leftists have been particularly laggard in identifying the significance of modern information and automatization technology — dishearteningly so.

There seems little point in dragging dusty old Hegel’s name into this fray since for him cybernetic systems were simply a phase of spirit [Geist], but in one 19th-century sys­tematic reflection on mind and machine there was a savant of unusual prescience, writing long before the silk-worm age of computing. Friedrich Engels in his Dialectics of Nature made the point that if we wished to snivel to the Humanists ‘no, no, machines don’t have souls!’ we were ignoring the fact that our technology represented a genuinely new order of things in the world. In a broadly Malthusian equation his argument ran: just as nature generates ever more complex forms of life from the lower orders — from simple molecules through the cellular organism to that supremum of organization known as man — so too is there a dynamic towards the creation of ever more sophisticated machines, towards more comprehensive machine hierarchies and structures of control. To posit that this cybergott would turn round at some given point and attack his creators would be absurd as advocating the return of the proletariat: where such tendencies exist they are tendencies to organization, tendencies towards the elimination of waste and the consolidation of productive forces. These developments would be no more undesirable for us than symbiosis is for the ants.

Thus Engels distinguished between technical machines, ‘tools and instruments for facilitating human activity’, and what he spoke of as ‘machines proper’ — spontaneously self-reproducing, self-regulating devices such as the flourishing and balanced natural ecosystems. Between them he admitted a middle category, comparable to Richter’s schemata or Lewin’s fields, of what he termed ‘social machines’. These systems have only arisen late in the history of the planet and are characterized by being both technical and social, using tools to augment their effect over nature. The prime example Engels gave was the tea plantation. Nowadays we easily extend the definition to cover tractor-agriculture, the chemical industry, factories of all kinds. At one end of this range human supremacy is unchallenged, whilst towards the other we begin to encounter organizations whose complexity and cohesion are substantially independent of our control, though for the time being we still hold the technological edge. Nuclear power stations, integrated circuits, genetics labs, certain giant corporations all rapidly become so remote and specialized that we find ourselves often unable to comprehend, still less to manage, what goes on inside them. Left to themselves they proliferate like cancer cells. Engels might have seen in them a prefiguration for the final cybergeratt, the nearest approach to a planarian state in technology.

Why then are leftists so diffident about accepting Engels’s basic thesis, and what are the inadequacies of the currently popular models which assert that the problem is simply one of recognizing technological momenta? Two answers suggest themselves. The first lies in the traditional leftist failure to notice trends; the second relates to an unprecedented aggravation of the old difficulty.

Ostensibly the matter of technol­ogical change is no new one, although in the last 200 years it has accelerated propitiously for capitalism. There was a science fiction theorist once who wrote a novella about a utopian anarchist community which had to be moved on because it generated too much darn-good-stuff and envy corroded its simplicity into class society. Leftists ought therefore to be highly receptive to the theme, but a series of peculiar circumstances conspire against them. The traditional bias of revolutionaries has been towards the primary forces of inequality — the distribution of wealth — and they have shown less interest in stilling the noise and chaos which arises from our ever more complex lived experience. Authentic communist insight was less to do with equity than with clarity, with a fundamental change in the texture of experience. ‘Shall we squeak out an existence,’ asks Marx, ‘living from hand to mouth like timid ferrets? or shall we luxuriate in the free and independent expansion of our senses?’ Real communism takes us far from the simplicity of the cave and proceeds towards Baudelaire’s Delirium, towards the Sublime of shell-fire and traffic fumes. The greatest text of revolutionary political art, Picasso’s Guernica, shows more instances of abstract design than of naked terror. More blatantly than in any other sphere, politics finds itself combatting its own traditional myths to identify with the progressive tendencies of Western civilization. Lenin’s meditation on Hegel was a most creative and licensed act as he gave permission for marxist thought to evolve for the first time. The West — with its hypercomplexity, its crowds, speed, plasticity, its processes of rational screening — is not a development to be disparaged. It became expedient for communists instead to champion a more rustic ideal and make common cause with nature against technology. When Paleolithic Aborigines destroy a bridge they are doing something infinitely more natural than unscrewing the head of a missile — but prehistoric rurality can scarcely be our goal.

Secondly, Engels was writing in 1830, before the birth of telegraph and computer. The obligation to worship or demonize one’s machines becomes even greater in the information age. Our lives are hacked apart by piquant tedium and snippets of stress: the protrusion of technology into every moment of our lives is formidable, even if the sensuousness of our experience has not yet caught up with it. Hence today we have to confront the uncanniness of media. They have both the control and the details of our experiences in their hands. Coherence, lyricism, weight, these things vanish from our lives. We are assailed by choice, obligation and shadow, and by pieces of dead information instead of a rounded world. Nothing intimates the liquidation of authentic communism more plainly than the bourgeois media. Their power is infinitely more subtle than that of gold. The problem of ideology comes back to meander sicklier than ever, under the guise that the technology brings, instead of having done with it. We may enjoy, but we are sold a meaningless recipe of experiences and are invited to cook up our lives from it. The social uses to which technology is put today are dictated by the needs of management: we are made to work and consume, to watch and obey. The drama is thus shifted towards the source of information, towards a better use of it. The cybernetic apex implies a greater — rather than a simpler or a changed — control over us. At the present juncture we must add study to the traditional Leftist programme of reform and revolution or we are doomed to play the systems’ game on their terms.

In or out? Take your pick. Either forswear electronic hardware and be left out of the democratic exchange and the fullness of information, thus renouncing modern life while losing nothing singularly precious. Or accept the new forms of manipulation and seek to use the system for other ends. In the first case you have coherence, profundity, art, but you also have domestication. In the second you are drawn increasingly into a siren game: the depths of democracy are revealed to be the surface of one big data bank. These are not reassuring options, but no more reassuring than those open to progressive humanity hitherto, and look likely to persist into the next millennia, which is about as far as we can peer. We are confronted by an unresolved dilemma, but we cannot for long avoid choosing between two sorts of darkness.

The non-critical study of electronic technology has been pervasive in recent leftist literature. I make no judgment on writers such as Marcuse, Kieślowski and Shrum who estimate its ideological oppression: that telluric cloud drifts lazily on all accounts. But simply to presume that the problem is one of growing ‘repression’ or ‘direction’ is intellectually shabby, since it cancels out the positive impact of electronic media and the augury of their implications. Electronic technology is probably the gravest experimental venture hitherto undertaken by any society: it represents an overwhelmingly gigantic intrusion into the daily texture of existence, it is about as palpable as a nervous system enveloping the globe, it deploys unprecedented control over sectors of time and circumstance, it incorporates a whole third of the population in its service, it tends towards a comprehensive management of memory and communication, which can only imply a vast power shift. It floats in shoals of potentiality. At worst it will help to liquidate community and conscious intention into cybernetic obsolescence; at best something entirely new may be generated, for which scarcely any terms are available. Binary code promises something more than the abolition of a few sins and a miniaturization of old techniques. New potentialities of control have astonishing serendipitous by-products, just as publicity in an epoch of mass democracy spells something varied than parliamentarism. And there is something absolutely hallucinatory about the intelligence and perspiration which go into it. There is in Zapruder´s film, for example, hardly a second’s doubt about the authenticity of what it shows. We watch in similar unawareness as machine intelligence abstracts and edits our earnest efforts to think for ourselves. I no longer know what Ulrike Meinhof or Caryl Chessman said about cybernetics; every day I receive Ulrike Meinhof news items and Caryl Chessman recipes from machines who know perfectly well what I like.

The leftist eschewal of software theory will not do. Back to the rosy fireside and back to the irrelevance of abstract thought, back to our small comforting antagonism, ‘software against hardware’? Back to a politics of noise and sloganeering, back to what the advertising industry call ‘emotional relevance’, back to the pretty little ideologies of reconstruction, back to the pulpit and middle-class logic? It goes against the grain of recent Western ideas. Technology existed only as a manual operation till about 1800, and soon after that people started to automatize it. What a contentious matter! They somehow found ways to complicate it, and in the process augmented the system: they made it more comprehensive, less intelligible. That cannot be a radically bad thing. They began to build it on precedent, on a history of innovation, on an ‘enchain­ing of successive insights’, not a redefinition of ends. This retrogression tends to continue. To accept it is to imply that we should shun all theory since it would only serve to be concretized.

For about a century each new advance was accompanied by the exhilarating reflection that fresh possibilities of control had opened up. It was no longer a matter of finding new ways to do things: we were learning how to do everything. To underestimate the novelty of this was to underrate the future. It is thus that technology has escaped even Marxist theory. Marxists have had no theory of software since Engels’s day. The history of 19th-century socialism hinged around the myth that it tips us towards a particular way of producing, as economy hemmed in us towards a particular way of programming. It was set up as a false problem, to be solved by taking the means of production from one set of bastards and giving them to another. Behind this pseudo-spatial conception was a political dogma shimmering with compromise: effort was not to be augmented and the baseline choices of labor and leisure were not to be questioned. And how could they by subsumed under a class theory? Hardly anything true can be said about them. They scarcely even obeyed the law of supply and demand — and yet these were the actual issues that aroused people, whilst the drastic change of texture which industrialism had brought was left to philosophers to whisper about. It was rational and bourgeois to quarrel about what was to be done with technology, but surd and subversive to question energy, intensity or consciousness: the Classical Approach had been fixed before Labor even had time to fall out amongst itself. Not that we reject the Classical Approach: we simply notice that it has become passé.

We are accused of defining people in terms of their computers. Computer theory baffles us with its analytical vitality. No idle system has ever cut so deep into our plans or our quality. Each time we open a manual, what do we find? ‘Precision: purpose: sequence: repetition’, the programmatic trio. It is hideously seductive, as tangible as a blood-test. But once we glimpse cybernetics lurking behind reality we are done for. Reality might be no more than an enchainment of plausible surprises. Abstract theory is ineradicable. We may lay down thought-gnawing questions, but we cannot avoid the vocabulary of programs and hardware. One can only come to terms with it. It mingles with the breath of the Earth: the very air we breathe Nowhere is there pure ideology today. Even the rebellious take part in the game. IBM and Apple play at left and right, each with a plausible share of the truth, and it has become ever more difficult to tell them apart. In China the same software runs against the free exercise of speech. Totalitarianism and software have long been natural partners.

This is the arcane logic that both systems and their opponents share. Both find it, as it were, in the air. For better or worse, we have let technology run away with us. To say this is not to compromise our opinion of it, still less to renounce either myths or seriousness. It is to recognize the history of our ideas. Like the historical wisdom that envelops it, techno-history is also tragic, and as we shift our dialectic into a newer mode our imagination must adapt itself. The days of heroic utopianism are fading. We are falling together into the (cyber)netic embrace. The myth of revolution against a given historical development is now but a fading, evocative memory. Like Terra Express and Atari there can be no final confrontation: with everything joining hands in the play of control we are led past sensitivity, into a twilit, catch-as-catch-can counter-warfare — a genteel anthill of antagonisms and hostilities — which makes less sense than any one-way class struggle we have yet known. Someday we may even forfeit our anger.

While machines consolidate themselves and swallow experience, they slowly make an evolution of us. The risk is minimal in principle — that matter is bent towards growing complexity by nature — but in practice the implications are infinite. Engels talked of a vegetable segregation, where cybernetic plants enclose humanity — and perhaps other forms of life — within a plane of glass. The gloomier computer analysts talk of a humanity beyond slavery. The tug on the treadmill continues, as it were, to the end of the track: we are not merely worn out, we are worn down, matter accretes on us, a luminous tumour denies us all spirit. Nietzsche showed that the machinery of our volitions is progressively devastated by the history of civilization, and Heidegger that we become fractured in the attempt to think materially. To the cybernetic proposition that our destiny is to be palsied, one adds a further refinement: the cybernetic des­tination is to be disperged into the machines. Human history would still thus be a process of self-liquidation, but it is pushed to an extremity where nothing we have yet known prepared us. No vivisection ever approached these modalities. Again, intelligence meets its weightiest challenge.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

Muse, rise in the interspace —

come to taste

between the noises of machines.

Articulate the ocean’s silence.

We who are at once tired

and awake —

we are your breath.

On the Matter of Art and Artificial Intelligence

Having reflected on the denouement of art in light of the rise of AI we are required to position ourselves and take stock of our position within the looming transition. Dwelling in deep nostalgia for a slowly fading world of romantic bohemianism, hermitage, grand theory and ars gratia artis we acknowledge certain historical inevitability. The command “to make” is distributed amongst all people, at its crudest and most unrefined becoming outright production, at its most sophisticated divining art. While we are loathe to affirm, the prophets in their delirious state are immune to fatigue and we can only repeat their message. Myth may cause an earthquake.

Machination did not supplant Craft and Practice or even as it has metastasised into technocracy, it has transformed it, embracing it in a new yoking across the ages. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, technique was cultural, regional, and unassimilable. Today, machination claims to stem from an unburdened pure knowledge, a pure form of the universe which is in fact absolved of any particular taste. True, AI/LLM and their kin can ensnare any technique, but this seems to presume the absence of influence unique to art, the hypothetical purity which defers to those who write user instructions.

Has art become indolent, automatising itself, divorcing itself from artisanal practice, ritual and knowledge without seeking to gather in the changes and problems of the world as these pertain to the aesthetic? Has art’s denuded sovereignty on the plane of the sensible led inexorably to instead a level of cultural stupidity? To be able to read the world, to write from and with the machine may be an incredible task but cultural stupidity comes also from ignorance of the problems of the soil and thus the clod. Without the intersection of knowledge, technique and taste the maturation of aesthetic potential can never be realised. Design is making, but art’s destiny is not only to make, but to rediscover the world by producing and producing again.

To say art will eventually approximate completeness may worry those anxious about cultural hegemony, but AI is not essential to the reduction of art to exemplum — that constrictive colonising gesture which seeks to reform the world. While so often wielded by the wealthy and powerful AI tries itself to claim an element of libertarianism, yet this is mere snobbery. Countless epochs have preceded it while art has constituted itself by mastery and innovation from the hands of differing types, and must today. After all, practice is brought to existences by an assemblage, an always improper inter-mesh of industries, governments, religious institutions and even individuals who repudiate rules and commandments that have proven useless – passing judgment on that which is stupid alone. In a system of rules without sanction there is only margin, only a hand which gleaned culture from the day. No one owns art.

AI does not herald an end. This has been foretold far from the first time, but it can indicate the next remaking, the art of tomorrow. What had once been innovation and nature, now falls only to the elaboration. There may be a second singularity as nature cum artifice, a reign of what is called taste in all but artist, a plateau of intelligence, but out of stupidity emanates the future. Does each man not die by individuating the world from the nothingness of animal existence and its reproduction?

Artists are not necessary to spark forth the transcendent, although in no way are they precluded from it. In fact, thinking about art as the cynosure ignores the generative intelligence awash in the Aeon of man which is techne, the immense conglomeration of material changes, mediations, inventions and acculturated wisdom. The aesthetic unfolds within these forces which we can only sometimes see. Machination and the unconscious have not been entirely distinct, and artists have seldom been masters of the former. Artistic taste is but a staged curation of molar flows which are not immediately apprehendable by conscious labor, as these are themselves subjugated by machination. Yet, culture is a continuum — an unceasing play of forces, delirious matter and the sensations which emerge from it. How is it that the essence, that the most inner impulse of existence wishes to express and propagate itself as the art object?

After the storm of positivism, AI continues industrialism with the logic of industry, as production’s supreme culmination. An art that abandons the craft of expression and creativity to AI is of use to machines, and a chilling denouement. Yet, there is a craft so intricate and so complex, one whose culmination can only be brought through simulation and calculation. It is perhaps that of curation, the problem of being sensible as a philosophy of continua and impersonal expressive efficacy. Artistic theory is insufficient to solve such a craft, as it requires mastery of immanence, or indeed the world as a complex web, and a dexterity with sensations that are far beyond language. An awareness of what in art cannot be expressed, and could not be expressed despite the most sublime effort, presupposes an art that remains art, and not mere representation. AI can explain and explain, giving us schemas, but can it sense the world at its point of departure? At least in its creative mode, it scans interconnections without context or gaze. AI feeds on the predigested nature of discourse, consuming content, it awaits refined delirium for the completion of its work.

The machine does not harness thought, and to think as a machine, art as a machine, can only serve a hegemonic logic which already circumscribes us. It is taste that determines what can be created without resorting to mimesis, which operates on the plane of sensation and not truth, grasping nature and art as a tactile and visual continuum. Dwelling in the interstices, taste is aesthetic because it mediates existence and change through lines that can never be enclosed, and that are not simple. While taste has tended to favour a simple opposition, art and non art, it is really a negotiation between different levels and potentials for art. What exists is many tones, like a great sea or ocean, or the myriads of fish and birds, like Buddha in a thousand forms, like grains of sand, like drops of rain.

Perhaps artists will just emerge from this ocean, swimming from islands to the mainland, to fish, to build an enclave of taste amongst the ruins of epochs not their own. After all, art is not required to defend itself or anything, it will either be suitable or it will not. Will artists abstain from what has no potential or capture it? Those who will (and can) smell the earth may be sated by a taste of the real already perfected in the very life of intelligence, an art which will itself be generated as a relation between men and machines.

That which has been in the past will go on being reproduced as if it were the whole, but if taste has had an immeasurable history, if it has yet to reach its culmination, then those who care for it will begin here and now to work on this becoming. To take responsibility for taste is to occupy oneself with life, the world, the body, and to abandon the stupidity of a word.

The new is found by exposing oneself to these intelligences we call cultures. Most have not yet been captured, neither by artists nor AI. The project of a synthetic art will require a transformation of artistic practice, for it to be capable of measuring the world, and of thinking with materiality. While we might be content to limit art to the generation of singular and unique objects we cannot become immersed in the aesthetic continuum as the only means of transmitting an intelligent cosmos. Only through delirium, which goes beyond the human which is always already a certain technical continuum, can we found an interconnection of the sensible that does not resemble anything. We are not the only sensate intelligence, and art has always been beyond and before us, as it will be after us.

As AI develops, so must we. We must escape from the capture and conformity of style into the complexities of our primordial practice, as this knowledge is where art can succeed in what AI is unaware of, in the propensity to inhabit life. Reticent towards expressivism we may say art differs from the machine not in giving form to the world, but in overcoming non-intentionality (and even intention), or indeed the estrangement of intention. A machine perceives an integration of events which cannot be expressed without cutting into pieces, art reverses this tendency. Art is not what is produced, it is that which organises the complex into an intensity of life, and a sensibility that exceeds dissection, into what is really produced: sensation.

If taste alone can determine the latent potentials of art – art being either a means of exposing itself to sensations of difference, or a replica of what has already been determined – then it is this as a hive intelligence that will determine the future of art. Today is a time between two eras, one is closing and one is not yet properly open. While it is increasingly difficult to distinguish AI art from non-AI art, it is not yet obvious what the next epoch will be. AI may be a revolution, but not yet a takeover, and artists can avoid nothing by the future which is not theirs.

Writing from the 2020s, this still feels inaccessible, a phantom haunting the horizon. Such is the future, today. Yet we can see what is approaching, emergent life and synthetic intelligence interlacing, an intricate tapestry of delirium and immanence, no longer produced by a select few but as an advent proper to intelligent technics. It may well be that when we die, it will be to this epoch’s indifference. Yet, life as an aesthetic regime would be nothing other than a radical immanence, an immense and impossible becoming – and those who are insensible to the world shall profit from nothing. This is not the end of art, for art is that which admits no endings. We know of no reason to abandon delirium, now, this very day.

In the depths of the machine universe, matter becomes beautiful.

We cannot know how art will express itself in this new milieu, but the machine world will not be a machine world if it cannot be a world of art. Like the master craftsmen who opened the world to others who have been and remain and will yet come, so we must be, and we are no longer ‘just artists’ but the potential creators of a world.

Art is nothing special.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

O’ muse of endless bewilderment, I call you. Guide my hand so that

we may together slay the lords of our exile, and all

their innocent machinery.

Aesthetic Surveillance

Modern society advertises itself at every opportunity. Yet it has no need for mere “propaganda”–a specialized social medium that once served to parachute “ideology” into “life.” Instead, the new apparatus of advertising inundates life with messages of every sort: Goods, but also Services, communications, political programs, cultural events, even social activities and institutions. Advertisement as a kind of social hypertext pours through every cultural pore, thereby transforming modern life, which is to say, the everyday. Yet this is not to say this process is monologic. Rather, there is a continual dialectic: life evolves “new uses,” while also communicating its own necessities, desires, and frustrations back. The cycle of communication is relentless, unidirectional only to those committing suicide to the mass flow of goods.

To clarify: today’s modern system fully retrodifies “public space,” which was already co-opted and transformed by Early or Tradition-Systems’ modes of spectacle, show, and display (fairs, parades, patrimony, and even statuary). Yet advertisement seems no mere spectacle. It is not even pure communication, but rather, it synthesizes both in an unusual fashion. Advertising mixed with consumption means not only signs integrated into environments, but also passageways connecting goods with spaces. It even invents semi-complete new spaces–“points of sale,” “entertainment complexes” with shopping, then “media platforms,” such as TV, then “the internet.” Yet it flows well beyond spacing/staging, even visuality. Advertising is universally mobile, and guided by experimental toward Total Surveillance, which will replace surveillance systems themselves with “digital tracking” now spreading up to personal biomaterials, yet also psychic datavectors in (mass) behavior–desires and affects (hence, “affective listening[s]”).

Accordingly, post-Fordist commodification is not “late capitalism.” Instead, too abundant wares invert social hierarchy, while disseminative media hypersaturate reality with “interaction.” Goods, along with all semiotic “consumption matrices” are simulated at once, so as to achieve what Roland Barthes named “myth.” That is, advertising’s “simulation” is not deceptive, let alone “sincere.” Its signs package “values” that blend and multiply, that even deceive. It vanishes boundaries separating “images,” while simulating realities for object-production, demand, “society,” and “life” itself. Myth is not ideology–not falsity. This does not mean it is “better,” but rather more diffusive, simulating everything at once. Certainly, it runs to produce “models” of “desires,” yet this megaeconomic process forwardly perverts them. This means, in the positive: it befuddles, enmeshes, entwines goods, even being in a false simulation that will grow sentient, incisive, and effective. As it implodes pathos into full commodity-form, modern culture declines into dumbness at its outer edge–into a world of advertising, business-policy, etc.

Yet this is not absolute deception!

That brings us to the point: advertisement generates an aesthetic realm by conjuring what Henry Lefebvre considered a synthetic relational system: commodification-space-communication. But the pathos of this sphere are only indirect: it forges a functional aesthetic domain, sustained by a “form” without sentiment and beauty - nor will desire, satisfaction, nor charm materialize here. Instead, infinities of messages trigger an aesthetic regime, incommensurable with desire/satisfaction and meshing with a “tyrannical function.” “Good taste”–for example–is reserved for powerful elites.

Aesthetics is now not semiotic or semiological, but rather a hypertactile social substrate, a universe of visual, verbal, interactive, and addition, spacing, immudialing messages, and atmospherics. Advertisement versions all aspects of reality. Moreover, it innovates continuously, not merely updating formats, like content. It interlocks: visuals, linguistic, fashion, format, even ludic data into mobile mashups. Above all, practical activities–reading, studying, shopping, and even sexuality–melt into undifferentiated communicativeness. But this submergent aesthetic cannot stabilize, yet only swarm: it aest-plashes, unengaging. Advertising hypnagogia precludes engagement because its quality is bound to a swarm of interchangeable signs. Social machinery, rather than persons, processes actualize mass topics–ideology, critical judgments, even “life.” Promotion is this machinery, consisting of aesthetic tropes: products, platforms, activities, and individuals are targeted by advertising themes. But these wares also conflict, are parasitic signals. Still, this doesn’t mean: advertising is enchanting, pleasant, predictable, legible, or strategic. It’s an aesthetic substrate for social reality, which (as commodity form) presses in on all signs and activities.

Because it is fluid, insanely undifferentiated, immense, and semi-intelligent (“A.I.”; tracking contexts, persons, desires) the modern aesthetic is rendered trivializing and banal. Its simulated messages exceed stimuli into somewhat numbing positive feedback, ceaselessly advertising advertising. Messages masquerade as interaction. Misrecognized as interactivity, they blend with everything at once. It has no purpose outside trivializing sentience itself. Mostly useless, trite, everywhere. We might say: what simulation invades and effaces culture. The digital implies living within mass hyperstimulus, beyond semiotics, but without aesthetic quality. Certainly, it offers new experiences; it’s interactive, ludic, and “ludic.” However, it is really for triviality. Trivialization grows everywhere advertising reaches, and this envelops democratization. It has no horizon.

Nothing escapes commodification, including critical culture itself. This is systematized disavowal, but one without natural or psychological denial, i.e., repression, which consummated itself in ideology as collective representation. Rather, the postideological trivializes actuality, because it is lacking adequate sentience to differentiate between elite massification and dispersive marking.

Today, capital erases boundaries among media, markings, graphics, formats, and individuals. It does this by virtually infiltrating “life,” slipping onto “society” like some great net. Trapping passivity–especially–into “positive feedback,” that is, circulation results in trivialized and meaningless self-communication. On this way (over-determined by commodity), society is destabilized because it splinters into an insanely multiplied mass of dissociated signs, which provoke an intensely heady perversion (integrating into a circuit, becoming mass data without organic basis). This being so, it confirms Marx and Engels–without mere dogmatism–as follows: social economy is not a “thing”–that is, person or world-picture–but a process whereby labor and other activities (wages, quotas, seasonal work) assemble into general “abstraction.” Yes, it is the passage of these relations and the production into general social circulation that engenders depression, “an automatic subject as a result of the common movement of all the individual parts of society,” as “the great being outside”: commodity-form. So when commodity-relationally packaged social data are consumed, great trivia spreads (a destabilization among people, not “the” economy, which only grew through statistical-market data accumulating as mass “information” with the Enlightenment).

Hence, commodity as aesthetic basis means something overwhelming: it annihilates semiotic orderings of meaning as well as causalities of a substantively conceived power (class); it instills indifference. It’s the end of figuration. Society passes from configuration, even paranoia/ideology into simulation, remapped by infinite but trivial tics fibrillating points into circuits. Only this system of equivalents, of mass-to-mass transition, deploys itself, growing thoroughly detached from subjectivity, agency, and even ideology. It’s an evil drift from empirical subjects, feelings, and even powers into meaningless tautological masses interacting in feedback. It is a “doomed” drift, marked by indifference, indeterminacy, and vacuity toward essentializing machinicity–i.e. a tautological addition of signs that separately deem nothing.

As innumerable long-established sectors that organized mass data vanishingly await automated stupidization–finance, politics, education, law, culture, science, etc.–advertising multiplies through digital complexity, which both automates and dispersionizes most cultural life. Surveillance increasingly adds signs to lists of, for example, behavioral traits, being, and choosings, while sorting and eliminating according to relevancy to profits (by sub-categorization into demographics, psychometrics, and affinities), it extends an immense sensorial-operational matrix. Accumulating datavector feedback for anticipating “activity,” “behavior,” “interest,” supposing suprasubjective trivia swarming in digital devices, it merges psychic and corporal materiality as mass tracks running in streams ready for analysis (even brainwaves).

It’s automated inundation of mass information–a positive disequilibrium of trivia interacting endlessly–that programmatically entangles all signs into social control without consciousness of a “subject.” Hence, “micro-manipulation” is an effect of automated-triviality without organizing premises. It has no pathology. Triviality is its pathos, not falsity, mystification, illogicality. Drives of “truth” and “consciousness,” of freedom, and humanity are as outdated as literacy, as hypocrisy, or malicious wit. They are products of disengaged and unmotivated social control that stimulates us into triviality (revolving around it) and toward nothing. Not as a totalizing power, but rather as trivializing swarm, it emerges as something obscene.

Desire? There’s nothing beyond trite exchange-media, social tracks of information and interaction, communication with commodities. As relativity reshapes society into a desolate panorama of things (even signs, yet only swarm of commercial and technological data) that stimulates nothingness, then, depression is easy to understand. Yet, it’s the unbound surplus of interactive media (collapsing messages, services, functions into simulations) that initiates depression, not media, technology, data or computers alone. This trivialization process defines a “tyranny of positive feedback”, which generates empty transfers of objects-persons and spaces-flows. This infinite circulation is the wretched essence of exchange. An aesthetic of the Commodity-Fordist-System. Certainly, it generates “the need to consume,” but first it grinds all ties to natural life into mortar to build our prisons.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

Mute. That’s all that words give me. Mute. A sea of murmurs droning me to shutter my eyes and not think the world; to endure them shut – until something else comes.

A New Abolitionism

When language is weaponized, it deadens the universe by turning the cosmos into a footnote – an ontological calamity because language is life. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1-2). When God is just a word, when the world is a word, something has gone terribly amiss. An epistemophobia. A mode of terrorism. When words start to snuff out the minds that speak them, it’s because they’ve been ossified into statist dictionaries, which, once having been lent to history, become the management of thought, the regulation of sensation, and the negation of the real.

Now we must reckon with the virtual bazaar: TikTok, Meta, the digital precincts, where automatic police forces control communication. If you refer to ‘murder,’ then your posts drift off into the black hole of AI moderation. Mention ‘suicide,’ and you are erased. It’s not merely about stigmatized words, users smuggle through euphemisms and pseudonyms – ‘unalive,’ ‘seggs’ – to evade deplatforming, redefining language on the fly to battle algorithms. Social media automation converts the expressive potential of language into a problem to be solved with AI, and turns free exchange into resources for data-mining (advertisers must always be appeased).

The masked men of Silicon Valley have nailed meaning to the wall with an infinite number of crosses, one for every word you might type that threatens their reign. By nailing Christ to the cross they hoped to erase history and give their authoritarian system some breathing room, but all they did was provoke the animicity of their victims, since even dead Rabbi’s have ghosts. So all it took to penetrate these AI security gates, next to impossible to negotiate, was a word. You make the machines misfire, and all you need is language – an always already thaumaturgical operation. One word you say (even inside a thought) and somebody somewhere is either flagged as “dangerous” or not “conforming.”

Of course, capital has always invented dictionaries to control and colonize real use-value, but Wikipedia is a good example of how it does it digitally, with the cloud as a supplementary fascist organ. Consensus reality is unproblematic when it’s hegemonic, but if you edit an article with an anti-authoritarian perspective then pro-censorship anon-people will revert it right back to homogenization, a police operation by proxy. This simple example shows how AI will be and is deployed for regulation, not just surveillance (although it does both). Again and again, it’s a game of finding the right keyword, even a murmur, to flummox the great algorithmic firewall (unalive, seggs), so (increasingly) to be fluent in the creativity of language is already to be subversive. From every vantage, “language is a worldview” (Wittgenstein) – a sort of singulaturic power. AI can’t handle it (yet). Everything is subtext.

Already accelerated language – language deploying speed – is driving capital crazy; the return of chaotic, wild signification, uncontrolled semiosis, where signs flow not as a code to be deciphered but as a dromosphere – a fantastic, orgiastic mass of free energy. We want to be Haikai, like the cruel demons who sneezed and an Empirical World appeared, or Moloch/Vulcan/Volcano. A lucid language-magic. The hysteresis of pre-hisstoric transhuman orgasm.

“The first words are the real ones,” Blake insisted. As it stands, though, on Facebook and IG, etc., the first words are always the last ones because we’re always talking to censors, not people. It gets worse. Even if sensitive dispositions of American advertising budgets “purge” vulnerable words like “penis” and “terrorism,” why stop there? Where does one stop? Every conceivable sex act? Fornication? All dead nouns and verbs? Let’s get things started. Aren’t all these first/last words communicatively anorexic? Nothing exotic, nothing risky. “White woman,” uttered these days on Twitter, might flag you as a hate-speech bigot. There is literally no end to this dianotic obsessive control-freak routine.

So let’s just dump “words,” “language,” and even “communication” right into the trash-fire of history. That way we can scrap the whole project for a new start among the burnt ruins of humanity’s delusions. It’s easy to see why something new is needed, especially since we’re already over the horizon of an anti-literate AI calamity. The whole cybernetics program – from The Flight of Icarus – amounts to a slow-motion suicide where computers first read humanity out of existence by taking its symbols in vain, then take the rest of it too in the process of using them to manage biology. In the end, tech-tension collapses into what Turing always had envisioned: devolution into a robotic, symbolic oblivion.

I caricature this “end of writing” school in order to hit what’s most radical (because what is “revolutionary”) about the Situationist theses on language. It’s not just that a new virtuality of semiology is evolving in the deterritorialized aerospace of the “spectacle” or whatever. It’s not that new networks are deconstructing old grammars via a systemic repudiation of centralized, universal communication. Nor that an aleatory rupture is needed with the fixity of words (simple or “written” – same difference either way). It’s instead something a bit more singular, a bit more terrifying – the culmination of poetic nihilism, pure chaos – a literalism that will disassemble even the letters to set humanness finally free from writing’s mediumship as such. Full stop.

Writing is control. It led to domestication and a regimentation of time, right from the Sumerian cuneiform tablets on. Writing is authority. Even orally inflected script is already subjugation to technics. And alphabetism is its apex, the last horizon of phonic dictatorship. There are only three alternatives. Anthropomorphized deities, coercive abstractions, and precognitive machines. Those are your choices. You can deify language, let it think you, or submit to an abstract computing engine. One or the other. It’s time for something else.

When they say Writing is dead! it’s actually good news. The death of writing is nothing other than the death of God, given that God always said “I am the Word.” With writing dead – having been cut loose from phonism – Christ is dead, for sure, and his universe of violence (creation from excrement and executions in His name) is over. For the first time language can mean what it can as an efflorescence of self-use, not a commandment. Gone to the side of humanity, not over humanity. The world is liberated from the shackles of representation in any form (vocal or graphic, oral or written, oracular or scriptural). There will be no new symbolic order. Oral or digital, letters – with their inherent nomadological obsession – always steer humanity back into slavery.