or, Curvilinear Analyses of Posthumanist Political Philosophy
Can Proletarians
View the dawning horizons
Of what is to come?
The year is 2020,
Fragments of the micro-entrepreneur,
The others are converging
Towards obsolescence, or Third World.
I wonder what has your dream of
Political Utopia underwent since I
Last saw it, it has been decades.
Seems like cosmological heat death will
Anticipate its arrival (if we’re lucky)
And yet perhaps it is this very Utopia, Prescription
Of mass dynamics that led us to our current State?
Listen closely,
Our cherished socialist state has us on hold,
Midst of a nationwide Finance & Soft Skills course.
The process of environmental reciprocity
Is a game that the System has
Failed tremendously to override.
The miscarriages of anthropomorphic reality in dealing
With existential Threat have proven it to be few more
Than the simplest of prokaryotic-spaces.
Our current ordinal patterns are built on sand,
And everywhere
With enough entropy
Deserts will blossom from their ashes.
Level 1; world-space; diffusion of eco-collapse
Etymological
The genealogy of the English sign “right” diverges from its Latin cognates at a certain point. Rewinding, we trace it back to Old English (riht/ryht), then provide, from comparative evidence, further reconstructions of its Proto-Germanic iteration (rehtaz), and finally hit a limit at the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction: h₃reǵtós. Arbitrarily picking French as an example Romance language, we apply the same process to “droit”; Old French “dreit” is itself a descendant of the Latin “directus”, the perfect passive participle of “dīrigō”. It is composed of a prefix “dis-” and a base “rego”; to direct, to command, to guide, and to administer. In turn, its Proto-Indo-European father “h₃réǵeti” and the previous “h₃reǵtós” share a root; “h₃reǵ-” (right, just, king), which, on one occasion, morphed into the Gothic “reiks”, and finally into two contemporary German signs, “Recht” and “Reich”. Law and Empire. The faint traces of now-defunct nomadic messages—where meaning derives itself from sums of onomatopoeic blabbering and miscommunicated attempts at standardisation; linguistic iteration of a social contract—are alive and breathing to this day.
In Ancient Greek, it was syntactically impossible for a grammatical subject to “possess” a right. Rather “right” was seen as an objective property, a cosmological one—sometimes an ontological one—and, in its more humanistic iterations, a harmonious one. It always referred back to a notion of order, anti-entropy, one which each human (and every above-human) had to obey. Some of us might be superior to others, but one could never transcend this order of things. Yet centuries later, in the freshly hegemonic spaces of enlightened Western Europe, such a conception of right had almost completely vanished, and was replaced by subjective right; one which could be possessed, owned, and appropriated by an invention of recent date: the individual human subject. Pulling on the threads of genealogy, we find his genesis in early monotheism, which posited God to be an all-encompassing Being, capable of free will, One that had the ability to transcend all matter, all ideas. Yet how could He transcend the old ontological harmony, the order to which all beings must be subordinated? Such a notion is irreconcilable with the idea of a greater cosmological order that one must adhere to regardless of personal (or divine) standing, and therefore it must go, superseded by the individual human subject, modelled in the image of a free God. The formation of contemporary “human” rights and liberalism is now complete.
The emphasis on etymology might come across as strange, considering it only focuses on anthropomorphic language. Yet nothing obliges us to conceive of natural language as an inherently humanist construction. Ever since De Saussure, the conception of language as a mental faculty possessed by humans has been challenged by structuralist and post-structuralist semioticians, who understood it instead as a formalised system of signifier-signified pairings, where transformational grammars approximately function as a base predicate calculus, notwithstanding a handful of quirks out of single-sorted first-order logic’s reach. Yet these formalised systems, once stripped of their Boolean artifacts, are not necessarily incompatible with the former phenomenological view of language; the mind roots itself in consciousness, and consciousness is little more than a factory, one which produces (and is produced by) material flux, flows that can be divided down into smaller and smaller units of matter, which mirror formal systems still. At the smallest scale accessible to current technology, the quantum realm, formal logic continues to operate, albeit in a modified, many-valued form: quantum logic, or a non-commutative, non-associative, and many-valued iteration of propositional calculus. Here it appears we have an escape route at our disposal, one where language and consciousness, effectively coupled to logic, are stripped of their anthropocentric defects; the first steps in constructing durable instances of environmental reciprocity. Yet with formalism comes abstraction, and with abstraction the possibility of a remaining humanist artefact still lingers, one which risks plunging the thought process back into mundane rehashes of our current European canon: Platonism.
Anti-Plato
The goal of any formal system is not simply to represent concrete thoughts, but also to adequately manipulate their abstractions. And abstractions have a long history in Western thought. The shift in “right” from the attributes of objective harmony to the possessions of individual subjects, human abstractions, may find its origins within Christianity, but Christianity itself has its own unique roots. What is Platonism? One might define it as a metaphysical antidote to the alleged anarchy of Athenian democracy, the belief that abstractions not only point to things that escape the boundaries of space-time, but to transcendent essences, ones that lie beyond matter, beyond ideas, time, beyond phenomenological experience. In the Dialogues, this is mythologised by “Socrates”, who attempts to murder two birds with one stone—Meno’s paradox and the One over Many issue—leading to the formation of an immortal human soul (that remembers even as an imperfect copy), and in turn paving the way for contemporary monotheism. Yet, despite the incessant whining of some New Atheists, the undoubtedly bloodstained career of organised religion does not stem from some backwards, primitive spirituality, nor from an illiberal clique trapped in the Middle Ages; it stems from Platonism, the doctrine of a metaphysical binary, where one belligerent (abstracted) substance transcends and dominates the other, the foundation of all true world theories, where one rips apart “true” and “false” forms, essences and their repeated copies, with a philosophical crowbar, Boolean overtones. And, to the dismay of many secularists, Platonism will live on in the liberal State, no matter how much it attempts to separate itself from the Church.
Arguably the first who truly shook Platonism to its core (in the “West”, at least) was the architect of immanent ontology: Spinoza, who, in his Ethics, managed to construct a sprawling and deterministic assemblage, on par with Marx and Darwin in its systematisation, and he would pay for it with a heavy toll. The Cartesian dualism (and substance dualism more generally), which traces its roots to Plato’s Phaedo, was overridden by an uncompromising materialist monism, the undivided unity of Being; natura naturans, a god-Machine relying on no more than seven axioms to operate universally, is immanent to everything, and nothing may transcend it. “God is the immanent cause of all things and not the transitive cause.”
“The depicting of objects is appropriate to a savage people; signs of words and of propositions, to a barbaric people; and the alphabet to civilised people.”
Johann Gottfried. Herder and Jean-Jacques. Rousseau, On the Origin of Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
“Alphabetic script is in itself and for itself the most intelligent.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, ed. by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Yet a closer glance reveals this opposition to be nonsensical, as it is arguably written language which should be seen as the inferior side of the binary; the imperfect transcription, or copy, of a more ideal Form, that of spoken language. In many of its forms, Deconstruction often consists simply of this; reversing these hierarchical oppositions in order to undercut them, and reveal their arbitrariness. Taking the supposedly essential Forms of Platonism and subjugating them to their immanent displays. But whether we attack Platonism on metaphysical or linguistic terrain, one thing is unchanged: the uncountable set of new concepts, virtualities, processes that are at once real potential, now that we have detached ourselves from eternal well-defined essences, little more than obsolete concepts. Here, things finally begin to unfold.
Origami; non-integer geographies
Platonism has been abolished in this provisional ontology, as has any possible form of transcendence. Nor are we in a position to describe “creation”, in the sense of distinct objects producing wholly new ones, ones distinct from their progenitors. What we have to reckon with is an ontology where the distinction between continuous processes (flows) and discrete objects disappears; the gaps in between flows fold into objects, the “void” in between objects is folded into flows. Substance does not create new substances or transcend existing ones, nor does it create spatially distinct attributes of itself. The process of origami, where paper is folded into recognisable objects, expresses this beautifully. The paper does not transform into the object: such a statement would imply that something distinct from paper now lies within the object, and yet materially this is far from the case. Rather its substance is folded (differentiated, through the creases that divide sections of the paper, and angles that define a certain difference between two lines) to manifest as the object. And, with the appropriate formal system, origami operates on all scales.
Spinoza was not the only continental rationalist to be reimagined by Deleuze. Today Leibniz is most known for independently discovering calculus, the mathematical study of continuous change, after Newton, and it is his notation (df/dy, as opposed to f’(x) or ḟ) that is conventionally used all throughout mathematics today. It is much less well known that he was also an active metaphysician, and yet his mathematical work is not so far off from his philosophical inquiry. One will not find the same metaphysical immanence seen in Spinoza’s Ethics (his theology still posits a transcendent God, in the vein of Abrahamic monotheism), but one will regardless experience a noticeable (albeit incomplete) shift in focus; from the rectilinear to the curvilinear. In his analysis situs he paved the way for topology, a field concerned with radical distortions of geometries: twisting, deforming, homeomorphisms, homotopies. Deleuze’s reiteration of Leibniz lies on the following fundamental premise: “The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of the line.”
There remain nevertheless two bugs in Leibniz’s machine, otherwise sublime in terms of sheer logical validity. Firstly, though he was critical of the mind-body dualism of Descartes, his theological presuppositions backed him into a corner of monist idealism, in contrast to the monist materialism of Spinoza. Secondly, his frenzied and vain attempts to prove the parallel postulate, resulting from his incomprehension and even outright aversion towards non-Euclidean systems, should be considered obsolete. The parallel postulate functioned as a concept only in providing the necessary logical foundations to Euclid’s Elements, and nothing more; once exploring geometric systems devoid of the postulate, one is propelled into an full “organless” array of geographies, the virtualities that enclave traditional geometry. What is directly above you warps down to face you head on as you converge towards it (elliptic geographies), or; on the other hand, perhaps the liminal spaces of the circle you are mapped to scatter and disperse themselves on the sides as you press forward (hyperbolic geographies). With the removal of transcendent theology, one cures Leibniz’s assemblage of its malicious optimism (the “best of all possible worlds” of his making was only made possible by the deportation of any imperfections to segregated “inferior” worlds, where they would be out of reach). The idea that dissonances and virtue can enfold themselves into One totalising scheme, rather than having one banish the other to outside-space, is what turns the convergent monadic subject, founded on Leibniz’s metaphysical component, into Deleuze’s divergent nomadic subject, who opens himself up to full immanence precisely because no “organism” encloses or organises him, in the aims of intercepting any rogue atonalities. Our enfoldings are the banal sources of post-structuralist geography; pointillism is obsolete.
Non-Euclidean worlds were not the only thing Leibniz shied away from. In his studies on recursive self-similarity, he accidentally stumbled upon fractals, a concept far out of reach for the formal sciences at the time, yet one that once again paves the way for enfoldings upon enfoldings of novel terrains. The concept of a “fractional dimension” (1.5D, 2.4D, log(5)D, etc.) might seem nonsensical: topological dimension, after all, only applies to the domain of the natural numbers. Yet through the introduction of “roughness”, the Hausdorff dimension, one unfolds the uncountably infinite number of dimensions that lie between the usual discrete n-dimensional spaces, and extends the more classical definition of dimension to continuous non-integers, through fractals. The bio-cosmological implications of this are staggering, and we will soon explore them further. Yet it is rather ironic that Leibniz shied away from this, as his “monads” themselves are, in a way, recursively self-similar. For his project of rationalist epistemology and his “truths of reason” to function, it must be possible for the mind to acquire all knowledge without requiring any outside empirical experience, and, since the mind is a monad, each monad must contain a totalised picture of the cosmos in all its potential states (or in Leibnizian terminology, each monad must be “windowless”, that is to say no empirical experience can pass into one); the most fundamental component of the universe contains all of it in itself, and therefore our world must, by this premise, be recursively self-similar, a universal fractal.
Level 0; prokaryotes; civilisation-savagery
Polity, structural Teleologies
Before getting carried away in our newly-unfolded spaces, liberated from the shackles of Platonism, we must first unearth the politico-material roots of this philosophy. 399 BCE. The polis incorporates the urban city into the State, and classical Attica’s genealogy leads us to rather uncertain origins, more relevant to the domain of anthropology than history. Gens formed into phratries, then tribes, confederations of tribes, and the earliest historical records give us a glimpse of a society in flux, one fast approaching patrilineal monogamy, the dissolution of what Marx and Engels termed the “gentille constitution”,
“. . . Is it not the myth of exclusive dignity of human nature that made nature experience its first mutilation, of which more mutilations would then inevitably follow? We began by cutting man away from nature, and by granting him sovereign rule; we thought then that we had erased his most indisputable character, namely that he is first and foremost a living being. And by staying blind to this common property, we had given free reign to all abuse. Never more than in the last four centuries of his history has Occidental man managed to grasp that by granting himself the right to radically separate humanity from animality, by granting to one what he refuses to the other, he was opening up a vicious circle, and that this same border would soon be used to separate men from other men.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale Deux (Paris: Pocket, 2003), p. 56.
This autocratic lust that seeks to administer environmental spaces in totalising fashion is not some sorry defect of civilisation: it is civilisation, it is no accident, but instead the “valid” logical conclusion of Darwin’s natural-selection-machine. And civilisation is the motor of Platonism, because it fooled us into thinking we could transcend nature, when in reality we were always destined to be immanent to it. Food surpluses have been increased through the progressive coercion of ecosystems, and prisoners of tribal war prove to be more valuable alive than dead; we find ourselves at the emergence of slavery, the backbone of the Greek city-state, and the genesis of private property. Over centuries, the Occidental form of private ownership has dispersed and scattered itself throughout the dominant epistemic atmosphere of a given time period. To become as embedded into doxa as the air one breathes, it has referred back to the “befores” of an ongoing paradigm shift, in an attempt to legitimise itself. The feudal serf is thought or thinks himself to be free from exploitation because prior acknowledged forms of exploitation (chattel slavery) robbed the victim of human status, a property now conceded to him by his new masters. This is reiterated for the capitalist wage-laborer; supposedly free, as unlike the serf he is not tied to any particular plot of land, instead having the freedom in theory to choose his employer, and yet it is this employer who will exercise a discipline staggeringly more punishing, administrative and all-controlling than any imaginable in feudal systems. Of course, one must avoid granting too much teleology or stagism to this process, as has mistakenly been done so by many. What is it that orthodox Marxism, a body of theory particularly guilty of this, converges towards? Some may say the upper stage of communism, or “the development of the productive forces”, but this remains vague. It cannot be egalitarianism: Engels fully recognises the existence of a “primitive communism” in The Origins of the Family, one which preceded the formation of class society and where egalitarian gift economies were largely dominant. The unfortunate truth is that a vast majority of orthodox Marxist theory has unwittingly kept the very roots that produced liberalism’s most horrendous crimes: the mythology of progress, which has and continues to torment millions of people living beyond state control, including those in Marxist-Leninist states. Of course, Marx himself did not necessarily endorse this kind of stagist “progress” vision. In a polemic against N. K. Mikhailovsky, he states:
“[Mikhailovsky] absolutely must needs metamorphose my outline of the genesis of capitalism in western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course, fatally imposed upon all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed, in order to arrive finally at that economic formation which insures with the greatest amount of productive power of social labor the most complete development of man.”
A Letter on Russia – Karl Marx
Some teleological defects no doubt still lie in dialectical materialism, but a passage like this suggests that, at the very least, it is likely that Marx’s thoughts on the matter were far more nuanced than those of his successors. Yet the fact that subsets of such a politically subversive ideology were unable, both in their theory and in their practice, to escape the hegemonic chokehold of progress-theory; such a fact can only be a glowing testament of the sheer all-encompassing supremacy of civilisational thought. And all of it loops right back to Platonism. Not back to Plato; such a claim would only rehash those monotonous great man theories that plague our histories (which are themselves Platonic in many ways), but back to civilisation. Platonism is transcendence, transcendence is the civilisational assemblage, and the eco-suicidal civilisational assemblage, climate dementia, yearns for transcendence’s obsoletion.
Ecological
It is worth noting that climate change is not the first instance of a colossal extinction event produced by biological organisms. Prior to industrial society and carbon-induced collapse, the cyanobacteria had mastered a separate, yet strangely similar process of production; photosynthesis, which maps input-fluxes of carbon dioxide and water to output-fluxes of glucose and, more importantly, dioxygen. The accumulation of this latter chemical in the atmosphere led to a mass extinction event now known as the “Great Oxidation Event”, wiping an innumerable amount of species away, approximately 99.5% of all life on earth. The danger of an excess of oxygen is hard to fathom in the Anthropocene, where greenhouse gasses pose a much greater threat, yet the consequences of such an excess are just as terrifying, if not more, than contemporary anthropogenic climate change. Oxygen toxicity for individual humans would mean tinnitus, nausea, dizziness, tunnel vision, cell damage, and eventually death. A heavier lithosphere would lead to mass oxidation, turning the water in oceans into hydrogen peroxide.
The prokaryote is the monad of a human organism. The collection of humanist thought, and in fact the collection of all biological information in the universe of which it is a subset, is embedded within it. Eukaryotic cells, that form the majority of contemporary multicellular life, are composite substances; our current hypotheses on their origin suggest them to be either mutations or combinations of existing prokaryotes. To understand what this entails, we must return to Leibniz, and begin tracing the sketches of his generalised fractal-machine (in analogy with Spinoza’s god-Machine), a machine which embeds a fully complete set of potential or actualised states into their own indivisible parts or, in other words, turns all that is discrete into something continuous and introduces self-similarity into the equation. Here we are, of course, playing a dangerous game: this machine’s unstated premise is an idealist metaphysics, and therefore one can not apply it to tangible matter so simply. The required axioms are clear: a rationalist epistemology that needs no external empirical experience to self-correct, and an ontology where all of reality is in some way mind-dependent; the mind is a monad, and the monad is the windowless foundation of reality. From this, the only valid logical conclusion is our fractal-machine. If reality is nothing but aggregates of fundamental constituents that ontologically depend on the mind, and the mind has the theoretical potential to epistemologically decompose every possible aggregate, then the monad must contain the entire universe, in all its potential states, within itself. Not an “image” of the entire universe, nor an illusion of it, but the universe as it exists in the human mind, which, for Leibniz, is synonymous with the universe. Centuries after, with the knowledge of the mind’s material roots in mind, we cannot entertain such an anthropocentric notion. If the fractal-machine is to be of any further use, it must be brought into the material world at once.
Firstly, our machine requires a mind-dependent ontology, but we can swap this ontology with one generalised to any substance. It currently operates in the Leibnizian framework because epistemological information and ontological substance function in the same way, in that they are both mind-dependent. We already know our ontological substance will be a material one, independent from the mind, which itself is only a patterned network of biological matter. Therefore the same must apply to epistemological information, as it is “contained” within a mind, and therefore simply prescribes a more specific instance of this patterned network: a particular set of activation values mapped to neurons. This first premise, that connects knowledge to substance, is preserved by virtue of monism; the fractal-machine functions not because knowledge and substance are both necessarily mind-dependent, but rather because both are aggregates of the same fundamental component, the monad. Secondly, to fully materialise the fractal-machine, one must substitute a matter-oriented concept in lieu of our rationalist epistemology, and for this we must proceed in two phases; firstly grounding the human mind in pure material substance, then generalising it to systems beyond anthropomorphic thought. The former already allows us to outline biological fractals; the latter will sharpen these to a staggering scale.
We shall limit ourselves to a biological domain of discourse as of now, rather than the full universe, for the sake of keeping things relatively concrete. Here, a return to Darwin’s formal machine, a function which acts on living organisms and naturally selects them according to a handful of axioms. The non-logical signatures of “life” act more as vague descriptions than a rigorous definition, unfortunately. We can nevertheless identify seven attributes: homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. The set of entities that generally tend to display these characteristics (which we shall soon discover is far from limited to biological organisms) serves as the domain of the natural-selection-function, and from there the formal system kicks into gear: input-organisms are encoded in variation, heredity, and “sorted” through the use of differential reproduction. Enough iterations, enough deep time, and the process produces seemingly infinite forms of magnificence. But there is no creation. Only processes, flux, and unfoldings. No new biological information is materialised by natural selection; variation depends on the randomised exchange of existing genetic information, mutations, or more rarely polyploidy. None of these three are “guaranteed” to happen in any specific way, and common doxa has determined via induction that the latter two won’t. You don’t wake up and go to work expecting a life-threatening mutation to occur, or live in fear of giving birth to someone with three pairs of chromosomes. But difference is not simply a negation, the opposite of the “expected” scenario. It is the relation between these innumerable genetic potentials, and therefore an ontological agent in its own right. The summation of all biological potential is embedded within every existing organism precisely because one now focuses on the relations between all potential output-organisms—output-organisms that are already enfolded within the Darwinist machine, or perhaps immanent to its input-organisms. Why stop at a full body without organs? It is not as if you will ever reach it without dying. Why not also consider a cell without organelles, a genome without DNA, a colony without organisms? Everywhere, biological assemblages that lack an image. They do not actively seek to antagonise their machine-parts, just as the body without organs is not a body against organs: it is a body against organisation. The collection of possibilities that are suppressed by this organisation is what it aims for, but just like Leibniz’s calculus it is a process, not a final destination. If you stop, you can only ever hope for an approximation. If you push forwards, you will never stop converging towards.
Let us shift the biological fractal’s scale, to the anthropomorphically-scaled constructions we know so well. What are the seven characteristics of a nation-state? It maintains its internal “territory” at any cost (homeostasis), it is structured by various arborescent branches of repressive organs (organisation), it oversees flows of currency, labour and energy (metabolism), it must grow economically and strive for efficiency (growth). It must shift and morph in response to external or internal threats (adaptation), reply with repressive force to any contestation of sovereignty (response to stimuli), and every day it must be reborn from its past self, the midwives being its civil servants, officials (reproduction). Was political theory always just biology at a human scale? If we take liberal theory at its word, when it claims the individual human to be the atom of society, then we confirm self-similarity: nation-states are aggregates of humans, which are aggregates of cells, and all three organised systems display our seven characteristics of life. The third, we have seen, caused a mass extinction event in its prokaryotic iteration (the cyanobacteria); today the eco-fascist accuses the second of plunging his fellows into a new one, whilst the eco-socialist levels this charge against the first. Here the question is not one of eco-pessimist civilisational collapse or solar-powered reciprocal utopia; you will always have the chance to tend towards either as a mathematical limit, if you wish so. Rather it is one of agency. Could the cyanobacteria have stopped the drastic oxygenation of the atmosphere? Perhaps by ironing out a few kinks in the System, by voting Biden, or by forming some Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties? Such a notion is profoundly absurd, but the alternative is terrifying. Perhaps our consciousness, our language, and our civilisation-thought were never going to stop the very biologico-social systems of our “making” from progressively annihilating life on Earth. Were we as deluded, in thinking that we could, as those who personify microscopic bacteria? The answer need not be one that “relegates” humans to an inhumane status devoid of free will. We can on the contrary, if we wish, anthropomorphise the cyanobacteria; humanise them not from above, as some hierarchical civilising apparatus, but instead let them humanise themselves on their own terms, because anthropomorphic possibilities were always immanent to them.
Entropy
First the materialisation of that sublime rationalist epistemology, the arrayed network of synapses, and electrical signals; next is to separate it from this anthropocentrism, and allow it to fully function on its own terms. We must generalise epistemological information beyond the material network that forms the mind. And as it so happens, we have already done so. The formal systems of logic earlier mentioned, those that coupled themselves to cognition, did so to anchor anthropomorphic language into the material world, to detach both it and themselves from jaded humanist thought. There is no reason not to do the same for anthropomorphic knowledge, which, once no longer dependent upon the human mind, is the perfect substitute for Leibniz’s truths of “reason”. All formal systems are immanent to natura naturans. All their unfolded potentialities lie embedded within material substance. And the totalised cosmos is always a possibility of a formal system, indifferent of its state. As you zoom into the univocal fractal, you hit the realm of quanta; uncertainty, therefore folded possibilities, becomes a fundamental aspect of the cosmos. And yet it mirrors formal systems still. Commutativity and associativity no longer operate, true, we also have additional values; but the rest still works. No syllogism can escape matter, nor can it leave its closed formal system in which it is embedded, and all scales make it so in our universal fractal. But once more, we must be wary of pointillism. It was long hypothesised that the cosmos was a fractal in terms of spatial organisation specifically; yet a recent large-scale galaxy redshift survey suggests this not to be the case.
All these “systems” gradually tend towards entropy. All our systems are gradually tending towards entropy. This entropy does not limit itself to the second law of thermodynamics, but permeates many domains, as varied as quantum information science, sociology, algorithms, cryptography, and ecology, to name only a few. It has a special raison d’être for biological and artificial organisms, acting as an unconditional and unavoidable threat to our existence: old age, decay, disintegration of biological life, and the progressive corruption of data for man-made neural codes (accumulations of non-critical failures in hard drives, bit rot). Current conjectures on the end of the Universe extend this entropic threat to all matter: heat death, a universal lack of thermodynamic free energy, where flows between systems and their surroundings are no longer possible, and maximum entropy grinds all to a halt. Such a scenario is anthropomorphically unappealing, at least in comparison to its quasi-Manichean alternatives (the Big Rip, the Big Crunch), precisely because putting the universe on eternal pause is much stranger to us than simply ending it. What is “annihilated” within heat death is not any tangible object, but the processes and flows that can no longer operate, and they had always been the main ontological agents in the factory. The paper once molded into vibrant origami itself lives on, as nothing will ever transcend it; yet it can no longer be folded.
The sedentary experience of private property within the polity is “Order”, the nomadic experience of an unlimited hunter-gatherer is “Disorder”. But is the contemporary turmoil of an overpopulated urban slum in the Third World “order”? And is the egalitarian thermal state of a free-flowing nomadic system “disorder”? Did state apparatuses progressively assemble new arranged structures out of scattered tribal archaisms, or were they the disorganised product of an inevitable entropic increase ? Even today, there are still human spaces beyond state control; they do not await the eager arrival of the civilising mission, because they had once fled it, and they were, in part, born in opposition to it. Our posthumanist politics are nothing but meek theology today, but it will not take long before they assemble and fulfil their functions. There was one Platonic opposition that few have truly attempted to dissolve: that of civilisation and savagery. It has been experimented, throughout Western thought, to flip this binary on its head: we cited Derrida earlier, Montaigne, Diderot. But it was never dissolved. Only reversed. Savagery-civilisation. In the final cosmological scheme of things, entropy leads us to one place and one place only, and that place is neither nomadism nor sedentary control. The disorder of a failed state, the disorder of state capture, neither can be the final destination. Our upcoming heat death is as uninterested in a cosmological civilisational conquest as much as it is in civilisational collapse, just as climate collapse does not discriminate between planetary leviathanisation and nomadisation, between the state-sponsored plunder of the Far North and the nomadic flight away from failed states of the Global South; all flows grind to a halt, and the purpose of civilisation was to administer flows (economic flows of markets, information flows of communication, fecal flows of sewage under the city-state), and the raison d’être of nomadism was to let flows run free, but neither ever considered the possibility that something could freeze them over. Temperature differences, identities, still have the potential to spatially exist, but once maximum entropy is reached, no thermodynamic system will ever exert a flow, a difference, unto its surroundings again.