The Challenge of Posthumanism

            From Reza Negarastani's blog:

It is through this operative fog that some of the more insidious mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism are directly plugged into the cognitive infrastructure under the guise of a world that appears determined to extend the plasticity of imagination and expand frontiers of action. But this is a world in which the financial closure of capitalism is cloned and grafted onto a cognitively maimed economy for accumulating false alternatives in the name of liberation of imagination and action. A suture of different overambitious vocations and driven by the wealth of waste it generates, the resulting beast is a prophetic vision of a tightly connected and controlled society with a single closed alimentary circuit, the human centipede. Those who scheme to infiltrate this world in order to militantly or cunningly liberate it from the inside are locked into the compactly segmented structure of the metameric organism. At once necessary for the growth yet expendable, every insider is a new addition to the iterated sequence of mouths and rectums through which the art world bootstraps itself - a miracle made possible by a simple but efficacious financial and cognitive algorithm. Dreams of acceleration or deceleration, speculative enthusiasm for the outside or critical self-reflection are revealed to be simply changes of frequency in the rate of the said iteration.

This is actually a very Land-ian (i.e. Nick Land) take on art, in that it critiques the institutionalization of art (although I like to believe that Land and Negarastani have radically differing political visions).  I basically read this as a fancy way of saying that all art has become commodified; but “commodification” is still a drastically human concept.  Instead of seeing this institutionalization as a process that continues to benefit the privileged and exclude the disenfranchised, perhaps we need to redefine (or recreate) our terms.  Or, if we want to remain somewhat loyal to the “scientific” version of Marxism, we need to resist the lure of the hypothetical puppet-master; that is, we have to resist the illusion that there is a master actor, or agent, pulling the strings and making a secret killing off all commodification while the rest of us shiver in our hovels and eat Ramen noodles.  Of course, there are those who make unfathomably large amounts of money while others make unfathomably little; but, if we adopt Negarastani’s posthuman machinic view (which might coincide with a version of scientific Marxism), nobody is manipulating the machine.  The machine manipulates everybody.

            There is nothing particularly new or groundbreaking in such an analysis, but let me push a bit further.  Another post by Negarastani that I find interesting:

The Labour of the Inhuman

Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of humanism. A universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision, it relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances. At the same time, inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction, to define what it means to be human by treating human as a manipulable and re-orientable hypothesis. Inhumanism is in concrete opposition to any theoretical paradigm that seeks to degrade humanity either in the face of its finitude or against the backdrop of the great outdoors. The force of inhumanism operates as a retroactive deterrence against anti-humanism by understanding humanity historically - in the broadest physico-biological and socio-economical sense of history - as an indispensable runway toward itself. But what is humanism, or precisely speaking, what specific commitment does 'being human' represent and how does the full practical elaboration of this commitment to humanity amount to inhumanism?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the conflation of posthumanism, inhumanism, and anti-humanism; what these terms mean and how they relate.  I have recently completed a paper that investigates posthumanism’s relationship to modernism, and how posthumanism is less of a push toward actual human-machine hybrids and more of an epistemological shift.  I believe this holds some kinship with Negarastani’s excerpt immediately above.  If we want to preserve the benefits and practical applicability of posthumanism, we need to distance ourselves from the purely speculative and hypothetical.  And by “distance ourselves,” I do not mean retreat from such speculations; I mean embrace and push beyond them.

            Contemporary British novelist Tom McCarthy, co-founder of the International Necronautical Society, describes posthumanism as an “intellectual folly”:

The desire, as expressed, for example, in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, to leave behind the fury and the mire of human veins, thereby achieving some imagined “freedom” or “autonomy.” This is not post-anything: it is merely Humanism 2.0. To rid the self of its contingency, its meshing in desire and networks of relationships, was humanism’s aspiration in the first place. It’s a reactionary aspiration, one that forecloses any type of genuine agency or ethics.

McCarthy argues that these types of fantasies do nothing to think beyond the human, but merely perpetuate the ideology of an essential, pure component of humanity that might be preserved through various material embodiments (computers, transubstantiation, as it pertains to the concept of the accident, Saṃsāra, etc.).  I agree entirely with McCarthy on this point, and it is for this reason that I believe posthumanism is in dire need of revision (and similar suggestions have been made by numerous posthuman critics, such as N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe).  Posthumanism must enable itself to think beyond human essence without abandoning the human entirely (that material organism that has certain biological needs); posthumanism is not anti-humanism, but the latter is required (to some extent) to think the former.  We have to resist the centrality of the human – its universality and, most importantly, its eternal quality (i.e. that “the human” is a permanent essence that will persist in some form or other).

            Ironically, McCarthy may have identified one of the most effective means of doing so in the manifestos for his International Necronautical Society (INS).  In its platform, which we can find inscribed at the bottom of its manifestos, McCarthy and co-founder Simon Critchley proclaim the purpose of the INS: “the INS constantly reiterates (or reenacts) its First Manifesto commitment to “map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” spaces that open up around the sign of death.”  Death, for McCarthy and Critchley, is the ultimate field of the nonhuman (perhaps McCarthy would be happier with this terminology…), and he claims that it should be the role of art to thrust humanity toward its own death, toward death’s immanence.  This is also not entirely original, as it draws from certain strands of speculative thought going as far back as Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  But it is worth noting for its resistance toward the coincidence of art with the human.  For McCarthy, art must purge itself of humanity as it nears the realm of death; the obliteration of the human.  Even this should not be read as “anti-humanist,” in my opinion; instead, it should be read as something radically posthuman, despite McCarthy’s distaste for this term.  Posthumanism, as an epistemological shift, heralds a new organization of knowledge as it relates to matter; pure organic, and inorganic, matter, void of subjectivity or selfhood.

            Throughout the twentieth century, modernist literature has increasingly come into contact with the posthuman as it brushes up against the consequences of death.  And through this contact, it has gradually developed its own posthuman epistemology, which philosophy as well as science have subsequently pursued.  In the terrifying world of the unliving (is it any wonder we today find pop culture fascinated with images of monsters, zombies, and aliens, all of which continually challenge our conceptions of life?) we must confront that the abject and the alternative, that the Other, might, in fact, exist entirely in that unthought space of our own nonexistence.

            This is not an argument for human extinction, and the practicality might seem far-off; but it is, in fact, quite near, and its applications are presenting themselves more each day; in the fields of animal studies, cybernetics and information technologies, emergence theory, assemblage theory, and physics, not to mention countless others.  While it remains true that our Western ideology (indeed, most modern ideologies as they have been subjected by the ubiquity of a global modernity) is still entrenched in the human, it is also true that our profound engagement and concern over what it means to be human is opening up doorways and possibilities for what it means to be nonhuman.  And this, I believe, is the true import of Negarastani’s quote on the inhuman as the “extended practical elaboration of humanism.”

            We’re still working out the chinks in the armor.  We’re still figuring out how exactly posthumanism fits into our worldview.  We’re still managing the differences between what it means to be human and what it means to be inhuman, since our knowledge of objects remains circumscribed by the materiality of our perceptions.  But the mere possibility of the implacable Other, which did not present itself until very recently (the eighteenth century, I would claim – as early as Robinson Crusoe’s mysterious footprint…), has now gestured to us, from the unfamiliar outside, that our sciences, our philosophies, and our literatures, might provide us with very real means of negotiating a posthuman existence.

The Fictionalization of Theory

            Over the past half-century, the West has witnessed what I refer to as the “fictionalization of theory.”  This process is necessarily related, in a dialectical fashion, to the “theorization of fiction.”  Most of us would infer that the latter means the theoretical treatment of fictional texts; however, it cannot preclude the infiltration of fiction by theory, or the gradually increasing appearance of theoretical treatment within fiction itself – an OFL, Occupy Fiction Literature, the subsumption of fiction by theory.  The fictionalization of theory, on the other hand, describes a reversal of the infiltrative process; that is, rather than theory occupy fiction, fiction begins a parasitic takeover of theory.  This is no more obvious than in the very recent phenomenon known as, appropriately enough, theory fiction, of which Reza Negarastani’s Cyclonopedia is perhaps the most obvious example.  While this brief description does not claim to offer an explanation of the phenomenon – the “fictionalization of theory” – it does attempt to offer a conceptual/historical view of the phenomenon.

            Most scholars recognize Martin Heidegger as the last true Western philosopher, or practitioner of that laudable field known as Philosophy.  After Heidegger, according to literary critic Fredric Jameson, the Western tradition witnessed the birth of something called theory.  This phenomenon, distinct from philosophy, was attributed mostly to the emergence of French poststructuralism (as it was later termed) and was characterized by a variety of intensely abstract regimes that all sought to properly account for various cultural institutions from language to history, psychology to gender, and many theorists found themselves on opposite sides of equally various methodological fences: deconstruction or Marxism, psychoanalysis or historicism?  The disagreements are innumerable; but most (if not all) of these theoretical programs shared the following commonality: they all were intensely concerned with what philosophy was about, and how philosophy – or philosophies – approached its object.  In short, theory became an attempt to organize and critique philosophy.  Amidst profoundly new cultural developments, from cybernetics to cyberpunk, theory became philosophy’s way to redefine (and re-identify) itself for the modern age.

            Although not apparent at first, one major component of this reassessment was the implementation and/or administration of a decidedly fictionalist methodology.  Many brands of theory concerned themselves with popular culture, fiction and cinema, on a level far beyond traditional philosophy.  This is perhaps most apparent in French poststructuralism, and in the methodologies of figures such as Derrida, Lacan, and Baudrillard.  Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” plays upon the very notion of the text as storytelling – speech versus writing – and participates in the Greek myth in order to develop its theory; Lacan’s illumination of ethics in psychoanalysis only comes out through a close reading of Antigone; and Baudrillard’s work frequently references science fiction, J.G. Ballard and others.  Baudrillard’s most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation, even opens with the following epigraph:

The simulacrum is never what hides truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

The epigraph is said to be found in Ecclesiastes; but no such quote appears anywhere in the Bible.  It is a craft of fiction.  Baudrillard states the influence of fiction for his theoretical approach more profoundly in Symbolic Exchange and Death when he clarifies that the only way to combat contemporary “hyperrealist” culture is via “some form of pataphysics, ‘a science of imaginary solutions’; that is, a science-fiction of the system’s reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction.”  If this sounds confusing and unreasonable, it is because Baudrillard is already participating in the science-fictional process he espouses.

            While literary criticism and analysis emphatically takes fiction – books – as its object of study, developing 20^th-century theory increasingly deploys fictional instances as examples of its abstract models, as though fiction already beat theory to the punch and has performed its methodologies in an aesthetic fashion.  But contemporary theory, I believe, exhibits its own brand of obscurantist aesthetics, which some have misinterpreted as a flaw or difficulty of the texts.  In contrast, I claim that obscurantism is not something that we must overcome or resolve, but something that should be incorporated as part and parcel of the theoretical work being done.  That is, the obscurantism itself contributes to the goal that the theorists have in mind.  In this way, however, a distinction should be maintained between what I am calling “theory” and what has been traditionally called “philosophy.”  While philosophy is not always easily accessible, it typically maintains a level of textual and cognitive logic that avoids contradiction or paradox; or, at the least, attempts to overcome paradox.  Theory, in contrast, revels in paradox.  In the words of Philip K. Dick, the paradox “does not tell; it points.  It is a sign, not the thing pointed to.”  Paradoxes must be read in new ways, and in different ways than traditional logic has told us; more specifically, they should be read as expressions of formal limitations.

            Derrida’s work circles an imaginary point between writing and speech, both of which seem necessary in order to permit the other.  Lacan’s semiotic study of the unconscious attests that meaning – that which we presume to speak from – is only created in retrospect.  Baudrillard’s particularly confounding model precludes the possibility of any real or original reality; rather, everything is already a copy.  Many have criticized these theorists and their work as lacking in logical rigor, or occasionally even as saying nothing substantial at all.  This accusation misidentifies what I see as the most useful aspect of “theory”: theory, more than traditional philosophy, is not concerned with ontology, actuality, or reality; theory, in its strongest application, is interested in form.

            This is why theorists become topics of study for Fredric Jameson, who seems to be in on the joke.  The work of theorists such as Derrida, Lacan, and Baudrillard – even if they do have some intelligent and logical points to make – are worth our time more as literary objects than as philosophical treatises.  To put it another way; they are worth our time as explorers and manipulators of fictional form.

            The association of theory with forms of popular narrative has only increased with the work of Slavoj Žižek, who often measures the accuracy of his claims by how many concrete examples he can find in popular cinema.  Since Žižek, the advent of what has been called “speculative realism” has exploded the relationship between theory and fiction.  Despite the severely serious and highly philosophical work done by figures such as Quentin Meillassoux, Manuel DeLanda, and Ray Brassier, several scholars involved in the current “speculative turn” compose what looks more like fiction than theory.  Nick Land (who has since abdicated from the realm of speculation and appropriated that of neoreaction) writes in his more recent work about “hyperstitions,” which are (to put it simply) fictional elements that make themselves real.  To be sure, some of Land’s writings are admittedly fictional, often expressing his ideas through the imagined researches of fictional scholars or professors.  Reza Negarastani expands on this idea in his text Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials, which cannot be described as novel, treatise, essay, or possibly even book.

            Negarastani’s text turns on its mysterious narrator’s (of which there are multiple – the text itself appears to be mostly comprised of a fictional manuscript) privileging of “plot holes,” particularly as they manifest in “Hidden Writing.”  The text relates the notion of geopolitical “( ) hole complexes” (subterranean terror networks) to the instances of plot inconsistencies in narrative texts.  The narrator claims that plot holes are not flaws or problems to be fixed – explained, covered over, or dismissed – but openings into the crosshatched layering of plots.  This layering is not reducible to layers of meaning, which could all potentially be retrieved through “deep reading”; no hermeneutic process will uncover or explain them.  Rather, the schizophrenic presence of plot multiplicity is only activated via the reader’s participation in the narrative.  Negarastani tells his readers that to “interact with Hidden Writings, one must persistently continue and contribute to the writing process of the book.”  For this specific reason, the text is never reducible to a single authorial voice; and Negarastani introduces this multi-authorial concept into his text, not only through the presence of multiple narrators, but also through the transcription of discussions from online forums which actively contribute to the text’s themes.

            The process of decrypting and re-encrypting, of rewriting the text, is not an uncommon theme in much late-20^th-century literature.  Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves embraces such a concept, as do the short works of Jorge Luis Borges.  Meillassoux even engages in such a method in his most recent work, The Number and the Siren, in which he sets forth an innovative and exciting reading of Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance”).  Several authors of late have been profoundly concerned with the nature of text, narrative, book, and author, and have attempted their own explorations of these concepts, to varying degrees of success.  Ultimately, I believe it is time to stop seeing what the infamous theorists of the twentieth century (Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, etc.) have to say about fiction, and to start considering them as fiction; or as, at least, a form of fiction, theory fiction, as Negarastani brings to the fore in his challenging text.

            This is merely a preliminary attempt to properly historicize the phenomenon I am identifying as the fictionalization of theory.  I currently offer no ontological or conceptual explication of the phenomenon.  But I wish to argue, as a final note, that not only is this fictionalization an unconscious historical phenomenon.  It is an imperative.  Eugene Thacker, an outlying participant in the speculative turn, recently made the claim that philosophy is intimately linked to horror; that is, to the genre of horror fiction.  Philosophy, so to speak, is horror.

            This assertion is the most explicit acknowledgement of theory as the gradual coming-to-consciousness of a new modern philosophy.  As a kind of coming-to-consciousness, theory must be conceptualized as an interrogation of formal limitations.  That is, we must read theory – particularly poststructuralist theory – in a dialectical sense, even when it adamantly proclaims its opposition to the dialectic.  The dialectic is necessary in order to better understand how 20^th-century theory appears as a cultural and philosophical process.  I claim that the fictionalization of theory provides philosophy with a necessary perspicuity of form in order to achieve its next logical step: the ability to devise practical and applicable ontologies of the inhuman world.  The epistemology of posthumanism is gradually coming into clearer focus.  As it does, we will be able to more properly develop ontologies of the Other.

Toward the Nova: the Role of the Dialectic in Modern Thought

*The following is a work in progress, intended for panel presentation soon.

            What connects modernity to the future?  What does the future tell us about modernity?  What relation is there between modernity and the future?  The more I stare at the word modernity, the more I realize that the modern world is only beginning to come into focus.  High Modernism may have passed in the 1930s, but modernity – and its aesthetic counterpart, modernism – is alive and well.  So what does it care about the future?

            In a fantastic novel by Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, the narrator conceptualizes something he calls “trigger points”:

As with free-falling bodies, it seems apparent that such quickening change, whether evolutionary, cultural, or technical, cannot accelerate indefinitely but must reach some terminal velocity.  Call that terminal velocity a trigger point, where the rate of change of the system reaches such a level that the system’s underpinning, its ability to change, is changed.  Trigger points come about when the progress of a system becomes so accelerated, its tools become so adept as self-replicating and self-modifying, that it thrusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection. (Powers 81)

Something is coming to consciousness in this description by Powers.  Complex systems are achieving a state, or level, at which their inner workings become self-sufficient and, in the process, become reflexive in a way that allows them to represent themselves back to themselves.  They acquire the ability to conceive of themselves as a system, along with the capacity to critique their own composition.  At this point, Powers claims, the system reaches a point of critical mass, beyond which it cannot evolve.

            Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which covers three narratives strands from the early 1900s to the contemporary 1980s (the novel was published in 1985), identifies here the moment of modernity itself.  That is, the moment at which history objectifies itself and thus fragments itself.  To put it in psychoanalytic terms, the subject is split, Lacan’s $ (coincidentally also the sign of the dollar, the ultimate alienating symbol of modernity).  History, at this moment, also becomes “about history,” as Powers puts it: “the century has become about itself, history about history: a still, eclectic, universally reflexive, uniformly diverse, closed circle, the homogeneous debris in space following a nova” (83).  The self-divided whole organizes itself, in Powers’s terminology, around what will eventually become a singularity, or perhaps already is.  The nova – a phenomenon that occurs when a star collapses and builds an accretion disc of matter and gases – is fated to become a gravitational singularity, but Powers means it in a metaphorical sense, as a figure of representation.  Here we have to enter into the tricky business of keeping the figurative constructions separate from their objective correlates, and in order to do this I choose to employ that ever feisty device: the dialectic.

            In recent decades, the dialectic has become an increasingly controversial term, drawing criticism from new Right conservative philosophers,[1] new Left speculative philosophers,[2] and even from its once loyal bedfellow, literary studies.[3]  To invoke dialectics often means to conjure the specters of Hegel and Marx, along with their two late 20^th-century innovators: Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.  Despite the recent skepticism toward dialectical methods of analysis, I insist on their presence in this piece and elsewhere for one primary reason: dialectical thought remains the most convincing and challenging conceptual form for representing our reality to this day.  Aside from dissolving the subject entirely – even admitting its existence as an illusion, a mental construction that emerges from brain activity – there exists a fundamental correlation between the external world and the world as perceived by human individuals.  This is not to say that the external world does not exist except in our perceptions; rather, it is to emphasize that we remain beholden to our empirical observations of the world, even if these observations are executed by instruments of modern technology.  The closest we may come to thinking the external world in-itself is the epistemology of posthumanism; coincidentally, the emergent epistemology of modernism itself.[4]

            The dialectic does not propose to grant access to objective reality.  Furthermore, the dialectic (as I deploy it here) does not threaten to hermetically seal us off from objective reality entirely, leaving us blind to the external world.  Rather, the dialectic must be recognized as the privileged form of representation which simultaneously constructs, and exposes the fragility of, the human subject as it exists in reality.  Powers’s “trigger points,” demonstrate the coming-to-consciousness of the modern world, but they also purport to establish a conceptual and ontological boundary beyond which knowledge no longer develops.  The boundary casts consciousness retrospectively onto the system that gives rise to it, but no longer constitutes the (preconscious) acquisitive expansion of material information.  Instead, the subject that emerges out of the system must conceive of itself dialectically in relation to that which exists (ideally) beyond the point of terminal velocity.

            This is how Powers arrives at the image of the nova, which will eventually become a black hole.  In terms of the physics of the universe, black holes are not only epistemologically unavailable to us; silent objects in dark rooms which would become luminescent if we could simply turn on the light.  They are, based on the very forms (space and time) that human beings require for knowledge, ontologically unknowable.  They are physical implosions of space and time, anomalies that warp the material universe immediately surrounding them (and likely, judging from their apparent ubiquity in the universe, they exert considerable force on physical reality as a whole).  Powers’s choices to describe the development of modernity, of history itself, as the matter orbiting a nova, and as a series of trigger points reaching terminal velocity, express a dialectical concern over historiography.

            On the one hand, the novel attempts a cohesive representation of history by tying its third-person narratives together through the central motif of the eponymous photograph taken by August Sander; the first-person narrative, in the voice of “Mr. P”, comments on the impact of photography and other technological media, and offers some speculations on the nature of history.  On the other hand, the novel disrupts this attempt, failing to draw together any ultimately meaningful narrative.  In fact, the novel’s conclusion is almost deflationary; Peter Mays, after having discovered his inheritance of a large sum of money from his ancestors, subsequently learns that it is worth almost nothing due to inflation.  Its most obvious narrative strand thus loses all steam, coming depressingly to an abrupt and nearly inconsequential halt.

            The text reflects what Powers defines as hyperprogress: “Hyperprogress transmutes, paradoxically, into stillness.  It is still true that things have changed more in the last thirty years than in all the time since Christ.  Since it is still true, then nothing has changed since Peguy.  Social culture has taken tail in mouth and rolled a benzene ring” (83).  What appears as progress exposes itself as meaningless, valueless development; but this does not mean that the ideal of progress – the object of desire – disappears.  Powers identifies the tendency of modern history to disguise itself as progress while being nothing more than senseless accretion, as the matter surrounding a nova; the Benjaminian storm that rages against the Angel of History.  The fantasy that is a progressive society constructs an imaginary ideal – an image of cultural improvement and/or perfection – and conceives of itself as striving toward this ideal.  However, history never achieves this ideal, but can only ever approach it as a curve approaches an asymptote: “Change in these fields [of science] does not stop at a trigger point.  Only the curve of progress reaches a critical moment, the second derivative goes to zero, and a new curve begins, pushed forward into a new country” (82).  Powers conceives of history in an asymptotic fashion.

            Fredric Jameson, recounting Derrida’s reading of Hegel, expresses the French philosopher’s latent dialectical conclusion.  Derrida, Jameson notes, declares that the Hegelian Aufhebung is “not an event, but a repetition”: “Nothing happens; all Aufhebung are the same.  They all seem to involve the transcendence of nature; yet the latter is merely a name for whatever is transcended in any of these processes, it is purely formal, the name of a moment, it has no content in its own right” (“Hegel’s Critics” 105).  Jameson moves deftly from poststructuralist to poststructuralist, explicating Derrida’s, and then Deleuze’s, critique of Hegelian Aufhebung; but the emptiness, or ideal figuration, of Aufhebung lurks as a constant specter (to invoke Derrida’s own terminology) in the background of his analysis.[5]  What emerges in Jameson’s intense study of Derrida’s and Deleuze’s critiques of Hegel is the understanding of Aufhebung not as material development, but as a representation of what matter develops toward.

            This representation, as Jameson declares, is purely ideological (106).  Powers confirms as much when he totalizes it as a modern synthetic image: “Nothing can take place in this century without some coincident event linking it into a conspiratorial whole” (Powers 83).[6]  The reflexivity of history – its self-awareness – does not give birth to some genuinely metaphysical, or essential, notion of history that is at work in the world.  Reflexivity results in the image, or the figure; above all else, the representation.  History appears on the horizon as something predestined or predetermined, as a course of necessary progression; but at the same moment that it appears as such, it also undermines its necessity.  It gives rise to the “conspiratorial whole” but emphasizes that this whole is purely figural.  It does not subsist in reality; but it shapes our relationship to reality because it is the only way in which we can conceive of this relationship.  And in this sense, the representation of reality confronts reality itself dialectically.  It is true that we cannot know the in-itself; but this does not dissipate the in-itself into nothing more than a cognitive illusion.

            That which escapes our representation, but which does not dissipate, is epitomized by the mathematical (and, I’m inclined to say, ontological) existence of the gravitational singularity; and this material singularity shapes and constructs all other theoretical singularities.  That which Aufhebung purports to represent – the historical singularity, the virtual space of all possible historical trajectories – is unavailable to us as human subjects.  We can only ever approximate the historical singularity through representation, which nears the asymptote of the singularity but can never surpass it.  The asymptote, in this conception, is equivalent to the black hole’s event horizon,[7] beyond which no matter (not even light) can escape the black hole’s gravity, thus making the black hole epistemologically and ontologically unavailable to us as observers.  We organize time into linear constructs, and space into geographic mappings; but black holes break down space and time, organizing an accretion disc of matter around the physical implosion of space-time.  Analogically, the historical singularity (represented through the image of Aufhebung) organizes time around perpetually collapsing matter: Benjamin’s Angel of History protesting the encroaching storm of progress.

            The “black hole,” the mathematical evidence for the gravitational singularity (according to which there exists a supermassive black hole at the center of most, if not all, galaxies), forms in our minds but remains unrepresentable except through its unrepresentability.  It is dark, lightless and soundless (empirically absent), because it deconstructs the forms by which human subjects can know – Kantian space and time.  Similarly, the historical singularity forms in our minds only through the idealistic and ideological representations of Aufhebung; but the actuality of what we might term history – what others have termed “deep time” or cosmic time[8] – exists beyond notions of linear time and geological space.  The event horizon of the historical singularity is insurmountable according to the Kantian forms of space and time, remains insurmountable even by our technological instruments.  We can only approach it on an increasingly shallow curve, representing it to ourselves as that which we approach in hopes of achieving, as Don DeLillo describes in his novel, Point Omega: “‘The omega point,’ [Elster] said.  ‘Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience’” (72).

            DeLillo brings us even closer to the gravitational singularity than Powers.  As a singularity that organized matter around collapsing spatiotemporal reality, the black hole reflects our inconsequential materiality back to us: “‘We want to be the dead matter we used to be.  We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter’” (50).  Recalling the Freudian death drive, Thanatos, DeLillo echoes Deleuze’s (and Nick Land’s) transplantation of the death drive into matter itself.  We all orbit black holes, subjective accretion discs, preparing for inevitable spatiotemporal implosion.  The construct “human” exposes itself as merely one more idealism: “‘De we have to be human forever?  Consciousness is exhausted.  Back now to inorganic matter.  This is what we want.  We want to be stones in a field’” (53).  Forget time, forget space; eventually, neither will be ours to remember.

            There is one important difference to illuminate between the historical and gravitational singularity.  The historical singularity exists, as does the gravitational, beyond the standard form of time.  We cannot traverse the singularity’s event horizon because beyond this limit we would descend into multi-dimensional time, into virtual time.  However, the event horizon of the historical singularity is still an ideal construct; if Aufhebung represents the unachievable, but remains an ideal, then the line of demarcation also remains ideal.  We can never cross the event horizon of Time because we have sealed ourselves off epistemologically, experientally.

            But you, I, we, can all traverse the event horizon of a black hole.

            The black hole is epistemologically and ontologically unavailable for the primary reason that to access it literally equals death.  We cannot know it, in our forms of space and time; and we cannot access it because of these same forms, but also because the black hole is a monster that eats us.  Eats everything; it eats space, time, gas, sound, light, the matter of universal reality collapses in the gravitational anomaly.  Human bodies are broken down, halved infinitesimally, until nothing more than the subatomic particles that comprise them (if not less…).  Black holes are the ontological instantiation of the material universe – reality, the real – that remains inaccessible for human knowledge.  Thus, if we maintain the analogy, we must ask ourselves a daring question:

            Is the historical singularity – which we represent to ourselves via the peaceful, utopian, desirable figure of Aufhebung – also that which is only available to matter itself; to the non-conscious?  To the ground known to Wordsworth’s Lucy?

            No motion has she now, no force;

            She neither hears nor sees;

            Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,

            With rocks, and stones, and trees.

What connects modernity to the future?  I would venture that it is this very quality of modernity by which it turns its objectifying lens onto itself, and thus relates itself representationally to the future it desires to achieve.[9]  Futurity, closely aligned with the concept of historical singularity, must exist in a virtual sense in that it possesses an openness; but we must impose on it the representation of Aufhebung.  That is, we must narrow our scope so that we accommodate the Kantian impositions of space and time.  Futurity, as it actually exists – the dark reality that wells up around our ankles – would kill us, consume us.  The dialectic thus serves two purposes: it protects us from the spatiotemporal apocalypse that awaits us beyond the event horizon; and it provides us with the form by which we can simultaneously understand and critique our own relation to the world.

            What Derrida perhaps unconsciously realized – and what Jameson certainly realizes – is that the dialectic is its own critique; its own deconstruction.  The dialectic does not destroy reality or seal us off entirely from it.  The dialectic is the self-refuting form of our relationship to reality.

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[1] See Nick Land’s neoreactionist denunciation: http://www.xenosystems.net/against-dialectics/

[2] The new movement known as Speculative Realism has demonstrated considerable resistance to dialectical thought.

[3] For an example, see Susan Stanford Friedman’s criticism of Jameson in “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies.”  Friedman accuses Jameson of a “reductionist” view that results in “singularity”; namely, the reduction of modernism to the effect of global capitalism.  In opposition to Friedman’s argument, and building on Jameson’s, this essay contests the following: a) the emergent “singularity” produced by dialectics is not interior to dialectics, and b) the dialectic is not dismissive to that which is exterior.

[4] This paper resists Quentin Meillassoux’s daring circumvention of all post-Kantian “correlationist” philosophy, as argued in After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.  Meillassoux’s compelling argument about the possibility to think a world without thought – for the object of thought to be non-thought – provides a momentous and exciting departure from the tradition of Western philosophy.  However, the threat (if we may call it such) of human extinction, and its ramifications on thought, are broached already in 1987 by Jean-François Lyotard in book, The Inhuman, in a poststructuralist manner quite different from Meillassoux’s method.  Without succumbing entirely to Lyotard’s postmodern pessimism, I venture a via media that allows the dialectic to persist, but to accommodate the possibility of thinking the non-thought.  The following pages will lay out a preliminary argument for such a possibility.

[5] The title of the section in which the essay is included is ‘Hegel Without Aufhebung’.

[6] See the first essay in Jameson’s Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism for commentary on the ideological structure of conspiracy theories.

[7] I am tempted here to invoke Alain Badiou’s concept of the event; a common philosophical concept, but one that Badiou conceives of as blasting the finitude of the State beyond its inherent limitations (see Badiou’s brief essay “The Idea of Communism” in the eponymously titled collection.  This language recalls Benjamin’s Messianic force of blasting history open in his Theses on the Philosophy of History.

[8] See Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle and Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (respectively).

[9] One must be careful with psychoanalytic language lest one imposes a psychoanalytic reading onto an objective ethos, a Weltanschauung; but if Aufhebung is an ideological construct – that is, a fantasy – then psychoanalysis has something to offer, to an extent.  At the moment, all I will say is that if we maintain the Freudian/Lacanian structuralism of a subject that desires and an object of desire, then we can read our historical narrative accordingly: that is, that history only appears retrospectively, that its object is imaginary (and thus unattainable) but that it is simultaneously “written” by the object that it pursues.  The fantasy, as Žižek tells us, actively constructs our reality.  Jameson unveils a very similar theory of history in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.  

Beyond Hyperreality: the Beginnings of a Critique of Relativism

            In his now canonical 1967 essay, Jacques Derrida provides a notorious critique of all brands of critical, humanistic thought by claiming that the structure of every theoretical framework is founded upon an arbitrary centrality.  That is, all fields of study merely appropriate the same material resources but attempt to organize these resources around their own proposed “center” (Derrida’s word).  Instead of arguing that successive fields of study might persistently better approximate the location of the mystical center, Derrida claims that all fields are engaged with one another in an endless intercourse of “play,” and that even within themselves all fields experience perpetual reconfigurations and reorganizations that establish perpetual patterns of play.  In what is perhaps the essay’s most infamous and controversial statement, Derrida overturns the existence of the concept of the center:

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible.  As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible.  At the center, the permutation or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden.  At least this permutation has always remained interdicted (and I am using this word deliberately).  Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted the very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality.  This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.  The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere.  The center is not the center. (“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences 279)

The final sentence has invited everything from praise, mimicry (in the entire practice of deconstruction), admiration, skepticism, dismissal, and outright condemnation.  Various critics have attacked its paradox, its impenetrability, and its elitism.  Others have praised it for its insight, its iconoclasm, and its influence.  All of these assessments possess legitimacy, and critics argue over Derrida’s relevance to this day.  However, there is one looming criticism that persists to this day which I aim to challenge in this post: the charge of relativism.

            Relativism is not directed specifically at Derrida, but at the whole of what typically is labeled as “postmodern theory,” and it charges (in short) that theory has abandoned its claims to absolute truth and correctness in any objective, logical sense (logic itself being a target of the human sciences).  In many cases, from Wittgenstein to Lyotard, relativism became the first accusation levied against the postmodernists, despite their vastly different theoretical approaches.  In some cases, the figures themselves (or their claims) appear to invite the criticism: Lyotard, who suggests that capitalism is the only system to have ever existed (from our perspective); Wittgenstein, who claims that individuals practice their own language games which in turn constitute their own forms of life; Baudrillard, who claims that reality itself has vanished behind the veneer of simulacra; Butler, who claims that bodies do not exist, but only the system of expressions they project; Latour, who claims that tuberculosis could not have killed Ramses because tuberculosis wasn’t invented until 1882 (tuberculosis was discovered, of course, not invented; but Latour is making a melodramatic comment).  All such theorists invite criticism for these seemingly relativist remarks.

            But does Bruno Latour mean that the bacterium which causes the disease known as tuberculosis didn’t exist in the time of Ramses?  Does Baudrillard mean that actual material reality has vanished, or that we no longer experience it (like in The Matrix)?  Does Butler mean that physical bodies don’t exist?  Relativism seems to eschew the notion of objective reality entirely; but are these theorists honestly adhering to such a position?  And is Derrida, the ultimate theoretician of deconstruction and poststructuralism, the spokesman for this apparently frustrating moment of philosophical history?

            I argue that relativism represents a misunderstanding of poststructuralist theory, and I hope to demonstrate this claim in my post.

            Relativism encounters its most objectionable circumstances in sociopolitical circumstances.  A poor man murders a rich man for his wallet, and certain actors argue that we attempt to understand the murderer’s perspective; this kind of relativist posturing is extremely common in sociopolitical circles, but it is not an actionable perspective supported by theorists such as Derrida.  In actual material programs and situations, the nuances of poststructuralist theory often lose their subtlety and become lost in the rhetorical grandstanding and empathic appeals of those involved.  For those who read poststructuralist theory (and read it closely), we can see that what look to be paradoxes, contradictions, or falsities are in fact gestures toward something else: a higher resolution, an amplified receptivity, or an adapted perspective.  If we pursue the problem in a dialectical fashion, then we must always be prepared to take the next step; but the presence of the next step doesn’t negate the existence of truth entirely.  What it does, on the contrary, is propel us toward it.  Dialectics is propulsion.

            Later in “Structure, Sign and Play,” Derrida explains the notion of play, this whimsical component that constitutes the true nature of a conceptual field:

This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.  One could say […] that this movement of play, permitted by the lack of absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. (“Structure” 289)

The imposition of a center has the effect of limiting a field; the center establishes boundaries, limits, borders by which all interior components now gain the semiotic status of concepts.  In effect, the imposition of the center creates a field of epistemology.  It establishes a framework of knowledge in which its individual terms and ideas can be said to have substantive meaning.  However, Derrida says, by the very nature of the mutability of the center, the field slips into a state of play.  Terms begin to stand in for one another, trade meanings, and even manifest in forms of mistaken use, misspelling, or combination with other terms.  As these new terms proliferate, they serve to inspire more substitutions and interchanges; thus, the state of play is infinite.  Derrida does not connect this to the fluidity of human use (as Wittgenstein does), but to the materiality of language itself.  Humans are not always aware when they use words incorrectly, substitute one for another, or even introduce a new term.  Language itself, through its almost parasitical permeance, invites and seduces us.  Of course, this grants a degree of anthropomorphism and intention to language that may not be there; but the point is that it is not in human actors either.  The intention, the awareness, is nonexistent.  Language, like an evolutionary process, simply adapts.

            None of this denies the material existence or objectivity of language, or of physical reality itself.  Instead, it suggests that material reality as we know it is changing.  The words and equations that we employ in order to know the world, to calculate it and figure it out, do not stop at mere representation – they actively alter the matter they appropriate.  Like a mirror that reflects the image of an object, it also has an external effect on that object.  In order to reflect, mirrors must capture and bounce back light, thus bouncing back an image; but in doing so, they bounce that light back onto the object.  Merely stand in front of a mirror and shine a flashlight into the glass.  The mirror will reflect you holding the flashlight, but it will also bounce the light from the flashlight back onto you.  What the mirror reflects is not an image of you as you are without a mirror in front of you:

            The mirror can only reflect you as you are in front of a mirror.

            The degree, amount, intensity of light present on your body will never be the same in front of a mirror as it is when there is no mirror next to you, even if that degree is minuscule.  What the mirror reflects is the image of you being reflected by a mirror.  Thus, the inevitable question arises: which is the original; the image of your reflection in the mirror, or the body being reflected?  The answer is obvious: there is no original.

            Just as we cannot think of the image in the mirror as an accurate representation of an eternal truth, neither can we think of networks of words, signifiers, or concepts as accurate representations of eternal truths.  As soon as the medium intervenes to reflect its object, it changes its object.  The original is lost.

            But the idea persists.

            Derrida explicitly comments that the lack of an origin opens up a field of play, prevents the field from arresting a constant structure, a structure consistent in its finitude.  As we acknowledge the rupture of history from its origins, we immediately constitute a new origin – a new event.  As Derrida masterfully communicates, every new dismissal of centers, origins, events, merely introduces new centers, new origins, and new events.  The relativism now appears immanent: the more we try to establish something closer to truth, the more we merely introduce new models, new epistemologies, thus appearing to remove ourselves even further from any high, spiritual, metaphysical notion of Truth.

            This, unfortunately, is a misinterpretation.  We are not leaving truth behind, or abandoning it, because we have mistakenly posited truth as something anterior and preexistent, something that we must analyze, experiment, and interpret our way back to.  If poststructuralism and its bedfellows have taught us anything, it is that we need a new definition of truth; and that this new definition, while resisting the old High Church sacredness of Logos, is substantial and effective nonetheless.

            We can no longer appeal to notions of what the Founding Fathers originally meant when they wrote the Constitution.  Their original meaning, their original intention, is not only useless; it is virtually nonexistent for us in our culture.  We can only hope to understand what the Constitution means for us, today, in our culture (and it’s possible that it may mean incinerating it entirely).  We can no longer ask whether or not Jesus Christ actually walked the earth; we can only ask what his existence is (and means) to us.  We can no longer ask what 9/11 was; we must continue to ask what it is.  While these approaches may deny the importance of an original, or even its existence altogether, they do not deny that there is something of truth in what these figures, images, symbols mean to us.  Just as Derrida’s systems engage in infinite play, so do our modes of production, our networks of signification, our fields of knowledge; but despite their endless play, they can still construct ideas, and where there are ideas, there are truths.

            I will not take this space to explore Alain Badiou’s new and radical concept of multiple truths, of truths that cause ruptures in the fabric of what is known and expected, although this philosophy seems to have some relevance here.  The task of distinguishing “multiple truths” from simply an obfuscation of relativism is too expansive and tiresome for a blog post.  I’m more interested in the perpetuation of poststructuralism and its related methodologies, sciences and studies which, in my opinion, have not nearly had their say.  The new movement deemed “speculative realism,” instead of tossing poststructuralism to the dustbin, is instead providing a bold new reinterpretation of its claims, even if some of them unsuccessfully sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of insanity and the Charybdis of obscurity.

            But beyond even the radical methodologies being boldly crafted by the speculative realists, there remains much substantive content to dredge up from the depths of poststructuralism.  If there is any literary form that is conjuring the old specters, it is Science fiction.  Studies in Science fiction, particularly those conducted by Fredric Jameson, Carl Freedman, and N. Katherine Hayles have brought poststructuralist terminology together with Science fiction literature (although Jameson’s and Freedman’s brand of Marxist hermeneutics opposes poststructuralism in some ways).  Despite its recent disfavor in academic circles, including literary departments, the allure of poststructuralism lingers on.

            But what does all this mean for relativism?  As the title suggests, this is only an initial step; in my personal opinion, Derrida’s writings offer something as far from relativism as we can get.  They offer a complex, rigorous, rational study of the operations of language, signification, and systems of communication (whether these be systems of language, knowledge, or culture).  If Derrida suggests that there is no center, it is not to emphasize the relativity of meaning and truth, but to merely suggest that systems, by their very nature, resist concretization.  The more we try to calculate and capture language, the more it calcifies; and, consequently, the more quickly it dies.

            Rather than consign these theorists and philosophers to the dustbin of relativism, we need to see how their ideas can illuminate truth in different ways.  To conclude, an example: in discussions of freedom, the object is typically referred to as a constant, an ideal, something essential that can be discerned and achieved.  Freedom is thus taken to mean something strict and definite.  In this sense, freedom is equated with truth.  While I do not intend to dispel the myth of freedom, I do think there is something to the myth of how freedom has been conceptualized; and that is to say, how it has been formed around the gravitational singularity of a center.  In my opinion, this center is that of the individual.  The individual constitutes a certain concept of freedom, and much of science and knowledge seems to support this center; but this center, despite its apparent universality, is still a historical construct.  It is still, despite any disbelief in the matter, something that we have made as a center.

            Without the individual, the concept of freedom does not disappear; it merely morphs, it adapts.  Without the individual, we do not lose touch with freedom as a truth.  It merely functions as a truth in a different way.  Truth, in this sense, still exists, and exists powerfully; but it can only ever exist in simultaneity with the culture that organizes it.  Like the mirror that reflects that object being reflected, truths can only be true for the entities for which they are true.  Tautologies galore, and I do not deny this; but there’s more.

            Once made into truths, into centers, these things (for what are they prior to their centralization?) complete a complex retroactivity.  By their very centralization – by their being made into truths – they achieve the illusion that they were truths all along.  That their essence of truth-ness existed prior to their projection; that they were prescribed as truths.  This very process of truth-making is more than simple illusion and false consciousness; for if that was the case, then this would mean that there is an ultimate baseline, a ground zero of truth that we can work our way back to.  The true illusion, in fact, is that there is any origin at all, any ground zero.  The appearance of illusion is an illusion.  The wild retroactive loop by which they appear as truth – by which they appeal real – makes them real, makes them into truth.  Ascribing relativity is merely a dismissal of the complexity of the situation.  The “truth” (oh, the ubiquity of a word…) is that truth doesn’t preexist us, it isn’t anterior to us; it is made along with us, and this making exists within a constant state of play.

            We should not see this as a diminishing or diminution of truths.  It is not a debasement or degradation.  It is the process of the process of truth.  The realization of the realization.

            The revelation that all truth has ever been is a continual process of revelation.

"Borrowing From the Future": Understanding Today By Looking at Tomorrow

            My first post on this new blog was about modernism.  I’m sure I’ll return to that topic more in future posts; but for now I want to make something of an introductory post to explain my new setting and new intention.

            Roadside Picnic is dedicated primarily to science fiction.  I will continue to contribute posts there, although likely not as much since I can’t afford to read as much science fiction during my semesters, especially now; I’m becoming more involved in my seminars, working on academic papers in my spare time, and also teaching American literature to undergraduates.  So my spare time to read science fiction is severely limited.

            However, my time to consider philosophy, critical theory, and literary analysis has become nearly universal.  It’s only natural that from the circumstances of my work I should encounter questions and issues that expand beyond the limits of the classroom.  I’ll be writing about those questions and issues here.

            “Borrowing from the future” is a phrase taken from Slavoj Žižek’s book Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.  While I don’t think all of Žižek’s work is particularly illuminating, or applicable to literary studies, I do think he embodies a considerable philosophical force in critical thought today.  On top of that, I think some of his ideas are admittedly very innovative and brilliant.  “Borrowing from the future” is an idea that comprises multiple elements.  At once, it includes Žižek’s paradoxical theory of the objective ontology of the symbolic order; but it also communicates (in my opinion) a certain utopian kernel, which I hope to explore in this blog.  Žižek writes: “The symbolic order is not a cause which intervenes from the outside, violently derailing the human animal and thus setting in motion its becoming-human; it is an effect, but a paradoxical effect which retroactively posits its presupposition, its own cause.”[1]  To put it briefly, the symbolic order appears as an effect of speaking animals, but it also paradoxically inscribes itself as the reason for speaking animals.

            It’s possible to see this as a very narrow, inclusive line of argument.  However, I like to think that Žižek actually opens us to a new speculative brand of thinking the world; one that coincides with the utopian tradition of Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Fredric Jameson, and (more recently) Alain Badiou.  In this sense, what we “borrow” from the future is the virtual perspective – the perspective that casts our present as the past of an undetermined future, rather than as the future of a historical determined past.  The speculative line of thought isn’t one of blind guesses and whimsical fancies.  By speculative, we mean critical; we mean the ability to envision alternatives to what seems certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt.  We want to think in the shadow of doubt.  In different shades of doubt.

            However, if we borrow from the future, then we must put back what we took (we cannot “live in the future,” so to speak; we have to return to the present).

            A text is never a closed work, and this is where I diverge significantly (and where most contemporary literary critics do) from the New Criticism.  A text, in any forms, is always both part of a network and permeated by a network.  Shakespeare leaps centuries and runs a streak through Ulysses like a flash of paint across a Jackson Pollack canvas.  Ulysses itself runs through Dhalgren, runs through Infinite Jest, runs through House of Leaves.  No critical analysis is ever complete because the network of associations can never be exhausted.

            In order to approximate a more complete analysis, we must look not only as the history of literature and literary forms, but at its future; or, more appropriately, what Philip K. Dick eloquently describes as future history.  If a text expands, absorbs, extends, and continually breaks boundaries, then it makes sense that we have to reorient ourselves away from the closed epistemologies of the past and instead look to the open, virtual (and yes, abstract) archaeologies of the future.  “Archaeologies of the future” is a somewhat paradoxical phrase; archaeology implies beginnings, origins, not futurity.  What, then, can an archaeology of the future be said to be?  It is, in Fredric Jameson’s words, viewing our present not as the future of an ordained, categorized, and historically conditioned past; but instead as the unknown past of an equally unknown and potential future.[2]  Thinking in these terms often appears distanced and abstract, so allow me to offer an example.

            In 2008, the United States (and the world market, by extenuation) suffered one of the worst financial disasters in its entire existence.  In retrospect, people asked why; and many economists, business owners, philosophers, and journalists attempted to provide answers.  These answers took the form of histories of the United States’ financial markets, narratives that observed the behaviors of large financial institutions which issued subprime mortgage-backed securities to homeowners that couldn’t afford the properties they bought.  Observing the causal continuum between homeowners, banks, and insurance companies, these histories traced the origin of financial crisis to risky and, as some (anonymous) individuals suggested, dishonorable behavior of the wolves of Wall Street.  This entire history provides us with an illuminating perspective on how the stock market and financial system works in America, as well as a poignant tale concerning the intertwining of morality, ethics, and legality in the national and global marketplace.

            While such a history might offer some facts about the collapse of financial institutions (and the debt and decay incurred by unsuspecting citizens), it actually does very little to tell us what the 2008 financial crisis is.  “It means corporations are evil,” some say; “It means people were stupid,” others say; “It means that we’re a country based on greed,” yet more will claim; but does any of this truly say what the crisis itself, the evolving financial technologies and the ever-increasing environment of risk, is in the sense of our world’s future?  The vulgar answer, “We have no future,” fails to apprehend the deterministic way in which the future itself reaches back to us, sinks its teeth into the material fabric of our culture, and pulls us (perhaps unwillingly) through the turbulent wake between now and then.

            So, if we reorient ourselves toward the future… what does it tell us about the financial crisis?  What is it?

            First, the financial crisis is more than its causal components.  It is not the epitome of financial mismanagement or bureaucratic waste, but one of the initial signs of a global economy evolving in an unprecedented manner.  What we can borrow from the future, in this regard, is a perspective from which the economic behavior and crisis of 2008 is not the result of human individuals, but is the broader process of a vast virtual network attempting to reconcile its own internal inconsistencies.  Instead of seeing technology as a tool at our disposal, we can see it as an intelligence system of its own, coming to slow awareness and seizing at the aspects that do not compute.  The more we feed algorithms into the network, the more its neurons begin firing on their own, recording nearly instantaneous market crashes occurring faster than a human can blink its eyes.[3]  Some might argue that none of this constitutes autonomy; but autonomy has been known to successfully conceal itself.[4]  And autonomy from the future, it may be said, is even more elusive; here we may look to works of science fiction for a more descriptive expression of potential autonomous entities arriving back to us.

            This is the difficulty of skeptical thought.  To dare the irrational, tempt the illogical.  While I do not claim to avoid contradiction, its existence does trouble me.  I think that where paradox is its strongest, we must fight to consider how our thought is entrenched in logic that precludes us from seeing ulterior modes, virtual paths.  As science has demonstrated over and over, the real is not always logical.  In order to prepare for the future, we must think the present.  And in order to think the present, we must borrow from the future.

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[1] See Slavoj Žižek’s Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, page 562.

[2] This concept is voiced at the conclusion of Jameson’s book, A Singular Modernity, and is also in the title of his book on Science fiction literature, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

[3] http://qz.com/124721/the-secret-financial-market-only-robots-can-see/

[4] Consider, for instance, Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of mimicry; or, perhaps a more complex theory, Michael Taussig’s explanation of mimesis in his book, Mimesis and Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses.