divination

by R. Artaud (Telos)

A continuation in spirit, but not form, from Part I.

At this point in our labors the notion of a “sense of life” became central to our analysis. In our eyes it had several components that in the usual way of things tended to develop sequentially. First there is the simple “will to live”. At a very early stage in the unfolding of living processes the organism seems driven by some unknown imperative to go on existing and expanding. Whether or not this tendency survives from some nonliving precursor of the organism, as Darwin believed, or is generated within the organism itself, as Henri Bergson argued, seems to us of little importance. More significant is the fact that it represents the emergence of a specific direction, however inchoate and unarticulated, within the flow of physical energy.

Second comes the sense of “self-identity through time”, which we take to be a kind of extended moment or extended point (homologous, that is, to the extended line or extended plane that defines a unidimensional or bidimensional movement along a single axis). That is to say, we take self-identity to be not just the property of persisting in being from moment to moment but of persisting in being along some determinate continuum that indexes change. No sooner has this “spatial” or “topological” sense of identity emerged than it tends to branch out into a variety of modes: the sense of being a “thing”, of being “one”, of being an “individual”. We say “tends to” because it would be a mistake to think of any one of these modes as primary and the others as derivative. They are all generated simultaneously and are essentially interdependent. We use the word “tends to” therefore to indicate the sort of general logical relation among the modes and not, necessarily, the temporal order of their development.

The third, and last, component of the sense of life that we can distinguish is what we call the sense of “being alive”, which we define as the logical negation of “being dead” and which, because it is negated, presupposes all the other two. There is, in other words, no sense of being alive in which the other two have not previously been invested. But just as the other two are simultaneously generated so too is the third, and its relation to the other two is essentially complementary rather than antagonistic.

This is especially evident if we take “being dead” not to mean non-existence but, instead, the cessation of any one or both of the other two senses. For then we can see that being dead is just as much a direction along the continuum as is the will to live, and that both of these, taken together, define the boundary between existence and nonexistence. Thus “being alive” means simply “neither being dead nor not-being-dead” — a state in which existence has passed beyond nonexistence and entered into the realm of some determinable or other, the first and lowest realm that encompasses the full range of organic being. The negation of this “being alive” — the absence of all direction in the flow of energy — is what we call chaos, a state that, since it implies the full extinction of the sense of being a thing, of being one, and of being an individual, is something quite different from the absence of all direction within any one of these senses. It is the extinction of life itself.

Now the fundamental situation that prevails throughout all of organic nature — indeed throughout the entire physical universe, so far as we know it — is this: the flow of energy is characterized by a surplus of “being alive” over “being dead”. More of what exists does not cease to exist than does cease to exist. There is more reality in life than in death. Somehow the universe has “slanted” in favor of existence, however we choose to understand what that means.

Put in these terms the “purpose” of nature, insofar as there is one, seems clear enough: to increase, so far as possible, the quantity of that surplus, to propagate it, and, ultimately, to maximize it. As a result, therefore, the first, fundamental “value” that we can infer from the observed facts — what, for lack of a better term, we must call the “value of life” — is just this: that it is better for there to be more existence than none than the reverse, that being alive is preferable to being dead, everything else being equal. We say that life has “intrinsic value” (even if, strictly speaking, we know of no “values” in nature).

This value of life — that it is good to be alive — appears to be something that in one way or another every living thing shares and this is not simply because being alive is necessary for it to reproduce and thus perpetuate its being alive but because all living things also, and necessarily, have a “will” (whether you want to call it that or not) to increase the quantity of that surplus to the utmost that conditions will allow, regardless of any possible “costs” that may accrue in the process. All things alive are not just concerned with their own individual existence but with the overall abundance of life, which we must understand, for the present at least, in very general and abstract terms, without reference to any of the higher forms of life or their organization into ecosystems. All this follows simply from the fact that there is more of what exists than does not exist, and that this is a condition that prevails throughout the whole of physical reality as we know it, even if its origin and meaning are matters of pure speculation.

Now in its purest form this sense of life has nothing to do with pleasure or pain, enjoyment or suffering, joy or grief. Whether pleasure and pain, enjoyment and suffering, joy and grief are, for any particular living thing, objects of its “will” or not depends entirely on the kind of organism it is, and we shall have a great deal to say later about this important question. For the moment, however, it is sufficient to remark that pleasure, pain, enjoyment and suffering are very specialized modes of being alive, much more complex than the will to live or the sense of self-identity, and they are by no means universal among living things. Not that we mean to deny the obvious fact that pleasure is to be found everywhere in the biosphere, and even outside it. What we mean to deny is that the will to live, or the sense of self-identity through time, requires them in any absolute sense, much less that they have any importance apart from them.

If the will to live is strong enough it will transform pain into pleasure and do it without winking. A dog that must get outside and go for a run will take pain or grief along with him, if need be, and sometimes will invent some in order to justify the trip. There is no question but that every living thing prefers to be alive and to keep on being alive, even if it has to work at it, even if it has to make sacrifices. This is as true of bacteria as it is of people, if not of rocks. If anything in nature is exempt from this general rule it can only be the things that are not alive, or it can only be because they have absorbed, so to speak, some surplus of the vitality of what is alive, and have in that way been brought into the realm of value.

This is the case, for example, with precious stones or metals. They have no value of their own but derive it from the work that was done to get them, work that had to be done because the will to live demands that everything count for something in the great ledger of being. A sunset that is simply beautiful has no value at all. A sunset that is beautiful and cost something to see — say, money or trouble or discomfort — has some value, which increases as the cost does, up to some point, beyond which the surplus of value disappears again as the cost becomes too great. Everything beyond that point is wasted effort. All work is a struggle against chaos, but each kind of work has its own line of retreat.

At this point you are no doubt thinking that all this is so obvious that there is hardly any point in discussing it. Why go on? If it is true that in the last analysis the only values are the values of life, what is the purpose of all our calculations and distinctions? If everything reduces to being alive, why talk about anything else?

The answer is that even though all values derive ultimately from the value of life, not all values can be expressed in terms of the value of life. It is because there are different ways in which the will to live may manifest itself that some of these values have no direct relationship to life at all. Nor do they lose their reality or importance just because they are not reducible to the value of life.

We might go so far as to say that values that have no intrinsic relationship to life — in other words, values of a type that we shall call “extrinsic” — are necessary to life just as much as values of an “intrinsic” type are, but for very different reasons. Values of an intrinsic type are those that contribute directly to the quantity of the surplus of value that belongs to life and helps it to grow. Values of an extrinsic type are those that do not contribute to this surplus directly, or do so only in a very indirect or minimal way, but instead function as means that serve to motivate things to act in ways that do contribute directly, or to reinforce the results of those actions that do contribute. It is obvious that such extrinsic values can be useful to life only insofar as life itself cannot manage, by itself, to produce and accumulate the necessary quantity of intrinsic value.

Intrinsic Values

Let us say that life itself produces, generates or induces intrinsic values of three principal types: what we shall call utility, beauty and meaning.

By “utility” we mean simply the “goodness” of an object or event for the sake of some desired result, and we assume that every living thing has some basic utilitarian drive (including the drive for self-identity, which can be understood as the need for a stable configuration or identity of utilitarian components).

By “beauty” we mean the enhancement of the will to live for the sake of itself, for its own intrinsic power, a gratification that, as it were, loops back upon itself to increase the vitality of the will itself.

By “meaning” we mean the contribution of some object or event to the integration and coherence of the world for a living thing, an integration that has meaning in the sense of reducing the sense of “chance” or “randomness” or “fatalism” that might otherwise prevail, by establishing connections among events that suggest they are related as means and ends. Meaning need not involve purpose or intent, as if some event were produced by nature in order to contribute to the coherence of a world. It is better to think of meaning as an attribute of events themselves, as an internal relationship among the parts of a whole that has the effect of strengthening the whole. The parts “mean” something to each other when they contribute to the maintenance of a pattern of behavior that has a function in relation to the survival and growth of life.

Utility, beauty, and meaning are then the three basic types of intrinsic values that contribute to the increase of the surplus of vitality that is life. They represent the “natural,” “aesthetic,” and “intellectual” aspects of life, as it were, its self-serving, self-gratifying, and self-cohering modes of behavior. But if this is what life is “on its own” (assuming we could even conceive of such a thing) then life is something very raw and elementary, indeed something whose relation to the highest forms of human existence it is hard to imagine.

Life’s relation to its own potentialities is like the relation of the silent movies to talkies — a sudden, vast qualitative change brought about by a relatively small and trivial modification in some pre-existing condition. Yet, when we try to identify that pre-existing condition it turns out to be elusive and hard to grasp. If, as we have said, the intrinsic values of life consist in utility, beauty and meaning, then they do not, at first glance, seem to be all that important or compelling. Even beauty is something we can do without. Without it our enjoyment of life may be dulled, but it does not affect the essence of our being alive. Utility and meaning, too, are accessories, not essentials. We can do without them as well, and we do not even know that we are lacking them until we discover that the hole in our heart is in a place where once beauty used to be.

In other words, the extrinsic values that make up life’s second set are crucial to life not because of any direct contribution they make to the surplus of vitality, but because they provide the motivation that enables life to generate or to generate more abundantly the intrinsic values of utility, beauty, and meaning. Extrinsic values can be understood as the “form” that life assumes in its efforts to enhance its intrinsic values.

We call these extrinsic values “form” not only because of their importance as motives but also because they themselves are indirectly dependent on a third type of value that we shall call “formal”. By “formal” values we mean certain irresistible or pre-eminently compelling configurations of being that act as “models” or “prototypes” for the realization of intrinsic or extrinsic values.

It is only insofar as something is formal that it is beautiful or meaningful or valuable in some other way, just as it is only insofar as something is beautiful or valuable or meaningful that it is utilitarian. Just as the model airplane you built when you were a boy did not serve to get you from one place to another, any more than did the real airplane, so that both were utilitarian only because they “stood for” real or possible machines that were utilitarian, or else because they motivated you to design or build such machines, or else because they satisfied some deep need you had for symmetry and grace, or else because they “meant” something to you personally that was not contained in any of their specific properties but only in the “formal” property of being airplanes, and, perhaps, of being toy airplanes, or of being miniaturized replicas of some specific type of machine, and so on. Thus we can see how it is that formal values function, in various combinations, to reinforce the achievement of all three types of intrinsic values.

At the same time, however, we must admit that there is something fishy about this business of formal values, as if it involved something essential and fundamental but at the same time unessential and superficial, like the relationship between a plan and its execution, or between a photograph and what it photographs, or between a symbol and what it stands for. We must also be aware of the danger that a “formal” value can easily degenerate into some kind of fetish or “magical object” that ceases to have any meaningful relation to its original model or prototype. We will return to these matters at a later time.

Now if it is true, as we have suggested, that all the values in the world derive ultimately from the value of life, then it must also be true that among all these values there is some set that is uniquely important in the sense that they are absolutely indispensable to life itself, no matter what else life may or may not include. Call these values the “minimal” values of life. They must include at least two of the intrinsic values: beauty and meaning (and, of course, the “formal” value that is a condition for their existence).

Without these two life would lose its capacity for self-reflection and self-transcendence and would degenerate into some brutish form of existence that is totally enmeshed in its immediate utilitarian interests. The beauty and meaning of life, on the other hand, make it capable of projecting itself into the future and of making connections with things outside itself and thus of generating its own purpose and thus of transforming its utility into something nobler. It is clear from this that, at the very least, life must include two “minimal” values: what we have called beauty and meaning. But what about the third: utility?

Here we must tread carefully, for at this point our argument could easily become unconvincing, and that is precisely because utility has traditionally been thought to be the principal value of life, perhaps the only one. This is especially true when utility is not conceived in a restricted way as a matter of convenience and efficiency, as in the “hedonic calculus” of eighteenth-century philosophers like Helvetius and Bentham, or of the classical school of political economy, but is understood in a universal sense that includes the very notion of purpose and its attendant concepts of good and bad, right and wrong.

While true that this broad, purposive conception of utility does not include within itself any specific idea of enjoyment, but that is only because enjoyment is itself a derived and dependent notion whose very possibility presupposes the existence of utility, since enjoyment is simply pleasure taken in something, and pleasure is merely a heightening of life’s basic utility (its capacity for keeping on existing). Hence it is reasonable to say that life itself is an endeavor or struggle, that its ultimate “value” is to be found in its success as an end (or “telos”) to which other things are merely means.

It is at this point that the arguments of utilitarian thinkers like Bentham and Mill, though compelling enough in themselves, reach their limits. It is as if they took a painting to be a reproduction of something that already existed as a concrete entity outside the canvas, whereas what needs to be explained is how a painting can ever be more than a painting, how anything can ever be more than itself. But to say this is not to reject the idea of utility, which must remain inseparable from every notion of life, as long as we understand it in terms of purposive endeavor and not as something aimed at mere comfort and convenience. In other words, the traditional utilitarian theory must be embraced and deepened by seeing in its “good” nothing less than the “telos” or purpose of all existence.

Thus life as we know it has set itself the task of overcoming itself, of destroying itself as a means to transcending itself to something that can be achieved only by going beyond utility, that is, by giving up the idea of utility itself. If the success of life were to be measured by the amount of utility it accumulates, then its success would consist in giving up utility altogether, for its “telos” is a state of being in which utility would no longer matter, where the purpose of things would be nothing. If utility is the first stage in the development of life, then the realization of this truth is the second stage. What comes after is life’s highest achievement: the self-abolition of utility.

Now if utility were something like beauty, or meaning, or even the conjunction of beauty and meaning, then it would make no sense to speak of it as something to be overcome, any more than we would speak of beauty or meaning or their conjunction as something to be overcome. But utility is none of these things. It is merely a property of living beings to find satisfaction in certain forms of behavior, to seek out such forms and to prolong or multiply such behavior. When these forms are also beautiful or meaningful or both, that is all to the good, because then the higher development of life (its “meaning” or “beauty”) can come into existence along with its need to go beyond what is beautiful and meaningful.

In other words, beauty and meaning are “in themselves” conditions that are desirable for their own sake, but utility is something “in itself” that has no more value than is necessary to achieve what is desirable in itself. Utility is what makes life possible, but only to the extent that it has to, not to the extent that it could.

Hence it is clear that the first principle of life must be to pursue its utility, and the second must be to abolish it. This second principle, in turn, must be pursued as if it were the first. To put it in yet another way: the meaning of life is a constant effort to achieve something that is impossible to achieve.

We can see how this double principle — “pursue utility and abolish it” — operates in the development of the natural sciences. Science is the means by which man extends his power over nature and this must be his fundamental interest if he is to survive, if he is to “live utilitarianly”, as it were. Yet as soon as science succeeds in giving man this increased power over nature it sets in motion forces that inevitably lead to a crisis in which science itself, together with all the other values that supported it, come into question. So long as science remains at the stage of experimental investigation it is able to ignore the problems posed by the absolute “disenchantment of the world” (Max Weber).

This comes home to it only with the breakthrough to a new theory. Yet the very fact that such a breakthrough is possible means that the enchantment of the world, the magic circle that excluded science and kept it at bay, must also be breaking down somewhere, and that, sooner or later, the same fate is in store for science itself. For what other reason could there be for a change in the basis of science if not that the very foundations of the world have shifted? We cannot believe that nature has taken note of all our efforts and made concessions to them in order to defend herself against them. It is just as likely that she has never heard of them or has merely forgotten them already. Yet this is what we wanted her to be aware of so that we might extend our power over her.

But then how is it possible that science can still claim to be the powerful disenchanter if its very achievements ultimately render it superfluous? In what sense is science “positive” if the very growth of knowledge paves the way for its own negation? As if by some paradoxical necessity the fullness of its own being forces science to question its own presuppositions, thus in the long run canceling out its achievements and condemning them to irrelevance.

How strange it is that science is willing to put up with this! How it clings to its problems! What does it matter to science if its conquest of the world remains incomplete? It will never get to the bottom of things. Every new stage of understanding that it achieves merely conceals deeper enigmas. It is not science’s fault. This is how things are. But why should science make itself responsible for things of this sort? Why not take up something else, like sports, say, or easing animals, or painting pictures, something where there is no talk of a “truth content” or a “reality behind appearances,” something that leaves one in peace? Surely science cannot believe that all the other things that people do are really just play and pastime compared to its own serious activity. Why should it have to shoulder the burden of the world?

Value of Life

We have wandered far from our subject. The question we wanted to address was: where is the value of life to be found, and what is it? We began by assuming that all values were reducible to the value of life and we saw that this had to be wrong. Then we explored what had to be right in the view that the value of life was not to be found in utility, but we had to recognize that, after all, utility was one of its indispensable components.

We will now take a step further in the same direction, without abandoning it, and attempt to clarify the position of the remaining two values, beauty and meaning. We will assume that utility, beauty and meaning are all indispensable conditions of life, yet that their “value” depends on their relationship to each other and that this relationship must therefore be very precise, so precise in fact as to justify calling them “formal” values. Thus formal values are those values that seem to stand between the values of life and the values of man; they are values that pertain to life as such, not to man as an individual. They are formal because they are universal, detached from all content and devoid of individual subjectivity.

Beauty and meaning are examples of formal values. This means that beauty is the formal value of life that manifests itself in the desire to preserve what is beautiful, and meaning is the formal value of life that manifests itself in the desire to increase what is meaningful. But neither the desire to preserve the beautiful nor the desire to increase the meaningful is identical with the value of life itself. Beauty and meaning have their own intrinsic worth, and this must be distinguished from their value for life. As long as this is not done, as long as we do not distinguish between form and content, between formal value and value of life, we remain caught in a maze of vague, ambiguous concepts, like utility, purpose, goal, finality, and so on. If we confuse these categories we end up confusing utility and finality as well. If finality were nothing more than the culmination of utility, then life would indeed be no more than a means to an end and there would be no reason not to strip it of all the ornamental trappings of beauty and meaning. But the problem is not so simple. For even if we accept that there are no such things as finalities and goals independent of utility, we cannot conclude that finality and goal are merely illusionary additions to utility.

On the contrary, they are integral parts of life, intrinsic to it, and they must therefore be understood in relation to utility, not as its projections, but as its conditions. Thus the beautiful or the meaningful are not appendages to the useful; rather, the useful is an appendage to the beautiful or the meaningful, depending on the perspective we take. For the perspective of life as a whole the beautiful and the meaningful are prior to the useful; for the perspective of its parts the useful is prior to the beautiful and the meaningful. It is thus that the beautiful and the meaningful enclose the useful between two impenetrable walls. The useful cannot penetrate beyond them. They form an absolute boundary within which alone its autonomy is ensured. Their interdependence has nothing to do with any reciprocal conversion of one into the other.

Beauty is the nonfunctional form of life, its irreplaceable “play-form”, its expression within itself, its “symbol” (to use a loaded word).

Meaning is its directional form, its irreversible developmental pattern, its unfolding within a specific continuum, its “narrative”.

These are the conditions of all utility, not vice versa. Just as play has no external goal that it would seek to achieve through victory, so too the meaningfulness of life does not rest on some future consummation to be reached through continuous exertion. The meaningfulness of life lies in its momentum, not in its goal.

Similarly, the value of life does not depend on any particular utilization of its possibilities. The value of its potentialities resides in the very fact that they are not realized, that they remain open. Therein lies their beauty. And in this sense we can even speak of a beauty of the meaningful, just as there can be a meaning in the beautiful. For beauty also has its openness, its subtle formality, its density of suggestion, even when it does not reach the intensity of meaning. In fact, there is no such thing as an absolutely meaningful work of art or absolutely meaningful behavior, just as there is no absolutely beautiful work of art or absolutely beautiful behavior. An excess of either one tends to destroy the other.

Whatever has meaning at the cost of beauty, beauty at the cost of meaning, form at the cost of content, or content at the cost of form is soon dead, bogged down in its own excess or emptiness. This is true both of life in general and of every kind of artistic achievement. This is the case whether we consider works of art in the usual sense or whether we regard the cosmos, the psyche or society as a work of art in the broad sense. Here and there we must lighten the meaning and brighten the beauty of what exists in order to bring it to its highest potential, so that its content can become form and its form content, so that the living unity of meaning and beauty may be preserved.

This unity is the essence of what we call style, the fundamental principle of all that is created by man, whether it is a work of art, an institution or a social order. Style is the unique signature of everything that has meaning and beauty. It is the touch of the artist in what is made. And this signature is valid for its creator as an absolute necessity, just as it is valid for the viewer, listener or user as an ultimate requirement. When two signatures correspond, a work of art comes into being, and only when they correspond. We cannot imagine any higher criterion for judgment, nor can we imagine any higher fulfillment for the one who creates than the absolute agreement of both signatures.

When the beautiful is meaningful and the meaningful is beautiful, when the clear is colorful and the colorful is clear, then all the senses of each sense have come together in a unity that is never confused or diluted by any externally imposed category, but is a fusion that arises from within, like the color of an iris, the sound of a string quartet, the taste of an exquisite meal, the touch of velvet, the smell of an orange blossom or the taste of warm water on thirsty lips. It is a matter of style, of taste.

What we have said about style will certainly seem odd to most people today. Today beauty and meaning have parted ways; each is pursued by itself, like a long-lost twin finally re-united in the golden years of a rip old age, each alone. Once they were inseparable, two dimensions of the same surface. Each wanted the other for its own sake. Each enriched the other, added something to it that it lacked.

Now beauty pursues its own measure, meaning its own development, each along a separate course, no longer crossing the path of the other. Style as the love of what is at once beautiful and meaningful is increasingly rare, like a shooting star that goes out alone in the night. Beauty and meaning are looking for it, but they are not yet one in it. Only once upon a time was there a signatory of the beautiful and the meaningful, a seal of unity that made them identical. Only once upon a time was there a style in which beauty and meaning embraced each other as the touch and the caress of the beloved. Only once upon a time was there a creator who could use that seal and who still had something to say.

As we have seen, the great artists are now fewer, the beautiful is less beautiful and the meaningful is less meaningful. This does not mean that the world is in bad taste, only that its inhabitants are jaded with life. But for some reason, maybe due to their great age, they have lost their appetite for unity, for the enjoyment of combining opposites into a higher unity. What exists today, taken all around, is much more than any one of us could possibly take. Each of us can take much, but not everything. And this is the case even if we look for a sign in the beloved who can embody what we wish for. This is what Duchamp was able to show when he painted the Madame Bustle. What was still necessary when Van Gogh put it all together in the new book of life. But if life has already gone into its reverse, if the thenreverseis no longer reversible, thenthereisonbeautiful.

by R. Artaud (Telos)

What follows is not a fragment from any lost work but it is in the spirit of Fragmentation. That is to say it is composed of shards from several discourses — from philosophy, psychology, social criticism, science fiction and maybe a few others. Nothing is added and nothing is subtracted except as needed to get them to fit together. Sometimes that is done by editing, sometimes by writing, sometimes by deleting. The result is an edifice that looks, if you squint just right, like a dromosome of some primitive but cunning molecule. You could not call it alive for sure, nor dead either, and it may prove impossible to see it clearly — even with a high-powered electron microscope. This is only fitting because, if I do say so myself, it is a remarkably profound structure and what you may hope to gain from inspecting it is an image of that-which-transcends. It may even be called a model or an icon — provided that the beholder remembers not to confuse the two terms with those other ones. There will be no caption below. If you are sufficiently developed then no caption should be necessary. If you are not, then no caption could possibly be helpful. Good luck.

(At the center) All is well.

(Tendrils radiating) Good will toward men.

(In each angle) A judge of good and evil.

(Caveat) Nothing is quite as it appears.

(Outermost layer) Closely-woven net of interrelated judgements, each indispensable to the continuity of the others.

(Third from center) Metagood and metaevil.

(Second from center) Over-all shape: organic molecule with or without coiled helix.

(Center) Punctum, unique point of singularity and unlimited energy.

(First from center) Relation between meta- and paragood-and-evil.

(Innermost layer) Contacts between Punctum and outer net.

The punctum is unique point of singularity and unlimited energy. That it is a point of singularity may be taken to imply that all points except this one are “ordinary” and share the same “generic” properties. In a word: this point is a hole in space. However that may be, we can say this: that any motion of the punctum toward the outer net will have the same general direction as all motions of paragood (and by paragood we mean both paragood-and-paragood, and paragood-and-paraevil, and paraevil-and-paragood); and that any motion of the punctum away from the outer net will have the same general direction as all motions of metaevil (and by metaevil we mean both metaevil-and-metaevil, and metaevil-and-metagood, and metagood-and-metaevil).

These properties of the punctum (singularity, hole in space, motions relative to paragood and metaevil) are to be taken as equivalent to saying that it is both Good and Evil, though in some strange way that these words no longer carry their usual meanings. (Recall that paragood and paraevil retain their usual meanings.) “Good” and “Evil” in reference to the punctum denote properties intrinsic to the punctum alone and are unrelated to the properties that it shares with paragood and metaevil. You might even say that these “Good” and “Evil” properties belong to two sets, one set containing “Good” and the other set containing “Evil”, such that no common element exists between the two sets. Yet they both relate to the punctum, as do paraevil and metagood. Here is an example that might help you grasp this situation more easily: Think of a diamond cut with facets arranged in two sets: one set shining downward and the other upward. There is no overlap between the two sets and you cannot tell which set belongs to “Good” and which to “Evil”. In order to know whether any particular facet belongs to the one set or the other, you must look at the polish on the edges between the facets. Only at these points will you be able to see which set goes with “Good” and which with “Evil”. “Good” and “Evil” do not, then, inhere in the punctum, but they do belong to the punctum in a special way, as do metagood and metaevil.

In saying this we must emphasize that “Good” and “Evil” are no more “polar” opposites than are metagood and metaevil. Each of the four properties denoted by these terms — two “Good” and two “Evil” — are intrinsically in a relationship of complementarity or, better, mutual complementation, each requiring the presence of all the others in order to be what it is, but at the same time all these four being mere moments, so to speak, of one unique energy that has no properties other than those that appear as the relations among these four. Only by gross abstraction and at the cost of some violence to reality can it be said that any two of them (whichever two) stand in an antithetical, much less a dialectical, relation to each other. Yet there is no doubt that this appearance is indispensable to any unfolding of events — as if the unique energy had to be parceled out among its four moments in order for anything to happen.

But it would be a great mistake to think that anything thus parceled out was somehow inessential to the total energy, or that this total energy in its pure unity was any way less than all the parceled-out parts taken together. This is what the meta- properties teach us. For both metagood and metaevil, taken together, exhaust all possible combinations of relations between paragood and paraevil, while their own relative parity is indifferent to all such relations. For example, metaevil is what results when there is perfect, rigid correspondence between paragood and paraevil (just as metagood results from perfect, rigid non-correspondence), while metagood and paraevil are merely paragood and paraevil when they agree and disagree, respectively. We shall not pause here to prove these propositions. (We omit also the obvious proof that when metaevil and paraevil agree they become metagood, and when they disagree, paragood.) Let it be said, however, that it is through a process of such simplification, abstraction and division that all knowledge begins — all that we ordinarily call knowledge, and not just what is accessible to the physical sciences. (But a moment ago we were speaking of what was not accessible to them, weren’t we?)

Once paragood and paraevil have been divided into metagood and metagood, and metagood and metaevil, the outer net can begin to take shape, its coherence deriving from the property of continuity in the relations among paragood, paragood, paraevil and metaevil. Not that there are not innumerable gaps in this net, or that the filaments composing it do not criss-cross one another in complicated and conflicting ways. Indeed, a striking characteristic of this net is that it appears to have two orders of magnitude, with filaments both very fine and very thick coexisting simultaneously, much as in the crosshatched areas of a certain type of pencil sketch. These filaments must be understood dynamically and not statically. It is not so much that some are taut while others are slack, or that some are stable while others are unstable, but that some are persisting while others are in flux, or that some are moving into or out of order while others are maintaining or changing the order in which they occur. Some have “frozen” what were previously relative movements into an absolute configuration of coherence, others are “melting” coherent configurations into new relative motions. There are tendrils of filaments that reach into and out of the center, as it were, transporting relative orders between the two surfaces of the net. In some regions of the net there are disturbances and displacements that can be interpreted as cyclical fluctuations of metagood and metaevil around a central equilibrium of paragood and paraevil. In other regions the cycles appear to have ceased and a single trend dominates, whether this is the rise of metagood over metaevil or the rise of metaevil over metagood, depending on what is taking place in the center. Still other regions give the impression of oscillating indecision, of oscillation within oscillation, of an inner turbulence in which no direction seems capable of winning out over any other.

It is not yet clear what mechanisms, if any, underlie these diverse behaviors, or even if the net as a whole is necessarily heading somewhere. We know only that somewhere in its inner depths lies the punctum, the point of singularity around which all its properties congregate and from which they radiate. And this much seems clear: that in its very simplest terms the structure of the outer net is made to resemble that of the most complicated molecular organisms. For at the center of every living organism lies an organelle called a mitochondrion, whose shape is roughly that of an elongated peanut and which resembles very closely the dromosome described above, not counting such frills as the presence of a double membrane, the complex coiling of the helix, and other molecular peculiarities. Could it be that life, if it has any “meaning”, exists solely for the purpose of symbolizing and interpreting the punctum and the net that surrounds it? If we could penetrate the enigma of the punctum, would it put us in mind of the “primal scene” — that ever-elusive nucleus of original trauma around which the whole edifice of psychoanalytic theory is woven? We must tread warily here, because if there is a core of truth in this speculation it may turn out that all our science and learning are no more than an elaborate self-deception aimed at warding off the stark, naked reality of the punctum and its only companions, absolute metagood and absolute metaevil. Perhaps in another age, or at least in another mood, we will have something useful to say on these matters. For now, we had better put the topic aside.

Proceed to Part II, Life.

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.