12 Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity

Rational thinking perceives intuition as magic. That which seemingly functions intuitively is regarded by rationality as something magical and fundamentally incomprehensible. Since religion respects and is partly based on intuition, religion cannot either be regarded as anything other than magic by narrowly limited rationality. Rationalism’s standard accusation against transrationalism is therefore to dismiss it as a bag of magical tricks – or quite simply as pure superstition. But what was magic yesterday is technological reality today. It is sufficient to study the four epoch-making information-technology paradigm shifts in history in order to conclude that this is the case. So while it is cynical to wish, on the other hand longing is a utopian act. And seen historically, longing for the utopia that today appears magically unrealistic is more of an expression of highly sensible forward planning.

If spoken language constituted the first dimension in the complex universe of language, written language must have appeared as pure magic when it gained a foothold as the second dimension and in a heartbeat enabled the building of the first civilisations and empires in history. And it is exactly thus – as (dangerous) magic – that Plato portrays writing in the dialogue Faidros. It is sufficient to imagine how impressive the first agricultural temples must have appeared in comparison with nomadism’s unassuming, temporary earthen floors for rain dancing which preceded them. With the arrival of the printing press, humanity entered the third mass medial dimension in the universe of language. Now it was accessibility – written texts suddenly became much cheaper – and the speed of the production of text that impressed to such a degree that the entire activity suddenly shone with a magical glow.

What was previously unattainable for almost everybody – the precious and sacred text with its information, knowledge, wisdom and magical narrative – was suddenly within reach of anyone who made the effort to learn to read, which before the printing press had been fairly pointless, since all laboriously hand-copied text manuscripts were unattainable for all except society’s richest and most privileged. Thus, in their capacity as readers and writers, people also quickly became accessible to each other to an extent never before seen. Thereby the general public was also widened to an unparalleled extent, and suddenly there was a considerably greater collective than the tribe or the village community – namely the nation – which provided the collective identity.

The Internet is of course the fourth dimension in the universe of language. If we had asked someone a hundred years ago how that person would perceive a world where billions of people and trillions of machines are intimately, communicatively, entangled with each other at every moment, constantly communicating, this fourth dimension of language would hardly have been called anything other than magic. The Internet has such dramatic consequences and thereby entails such a radical revolution that we must also regard this phenomenon as a fourth dimension in relation to three-dimensional physical space. Global geography is being rocked to its foundations because of the radically truncated distances on the planet – this applies both to human and mechanical players – that the Internet entails. And every time this magic appears, it means that a new hope is born. It does not require any unrealistic superfluity of historical insight to understand the human need for utopias. For without utopias, there are of course no visions, no ideals in common to strive for; and without visions there is of course no hope, at least not in the form of any concrete formulation that can constitute an objective for how society should be organised. To long for the utopia is therefore not to wish for the impossible; it is rather to understand the importance of thinking the magical, that which today seems completely impossible, as something that is tomorrow’s most necessary, beautiful and actually most reasonable possibility. So what then does the road to the utopia look like?

In relationalist physics emergences play a central role. Emergences appear when a more simple system for some reason or other attains a higher degree of complexity to such a great extent that it changes shape and transforms into a completely new phenomenon with completely new properties. An example might be that biology is regarded as an emergent phenomenon in relation to chemistry, in the same way that chemistry in turn is an emergent phenomenon in relation to physics. And if emergences play a central role within the sciences, there is no fundamental reason to exclude the possibility that the metaphysical equivalent to these emergences could play as important a role in social theories. There is thus good reason to regard the metaphysical event as the social equivalent to the physical emergence.

Relativist metaphysics attacks the classical idea of truth. There is nothing strange about that. Throughout history we see time after time how yesterday’s established truth is phased out to be replaced by a new and soon equally established, alternative truth. The intensity in this process increases when the new elite takes over a society in conjunction with a paradigm shift and prioritises completely different ideals from those of the displaced elite. Relativist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michael Foucault confront these historical shifts with a pragmatist attitude to truth production: truths are produced first and foremost by the prevailing power structure for the purpose of confirming and consolidating the power of the powerful. Nor is there anything strange in that; the opposite would be extremely remarkable. A truth can only become and remain a truth as long as it stays within the sociocultural paradigm that is embraced by society, which means that various and conflicting truths are pitted against each other during every transitional phase. The truths are therefore always relative. They should and must be able to endure constant criticism. When they no longer hold their own against this criticism in the light of new information, they must be phased out and replaced.

However, relationalist metaphysics takes this Nietzschean and Foucauldian critical thinking about truth production one step further. Quite simply, according to relationalism, relativism does not go far enough in its criticism of an antiquated and useless idea of truth. A new metatruth is required for the Internet age. It is correct that the prevailing power structure strives to produce the truth that confirms and solidifies its position. But regardless of this, a new truth may have a higher informational content and a stronger empirical demonstrability than an old one, that is, aside from its greater relevance and usability for a new power structure. According to this view, it may thus climb higher in a hierarchy of produced truth and de facto be closer to an imagined, but in fact in terms of its formulation, inaccessible reality well-founded in physically indisputable facts, by constituting an emergence in relation to the old version of truth.

A new, emergent version of truth is born out of the old truth, but takes the whole issue to a completely new level, and at this higher level the new version of truth has a whole new acceptance and all new consequences for the collective world view compared with the truth that was previously generally embraced. The new truth is intersubjectively rather than objectively truer than the old one, both nominally and relatively. For example, when from a contemporary perspective we dissect capitalism’s and industrialism’s writing of history and dismiss the idea that the events that transpired in Paris during a few years after the initial shot that was fired in 1789 really constituted a revolution in any interesting sense, and instead classify it as a symptom of a real revolution that had taken place long before – where the actual revolution we are then referring to obviously is that the printing press starts to produce reading material that is accessible to the general public in Germany in the mid-15th century – it means that we upgrade the printing press to a predecessor of the Internet revolution of our own age, where the genesis of the Internet is the emergent phenomenon that compels us to rewrite all of history in order for us to understand both ourselves and the events that have created us in an intersubjectively deeper way than was previously possible.

Through this new, information-technology writing of history, we receive not just a more relevant and more power-generating world view for the burgeoning netocracy – thus far a relativist historian would agree – but we also receive, through the Internet’s status as an historical emergence, also a de facto truer, and from an intersubjective perspective more realistic, view of history as such. The emergence quite simply helps us to see a greater depth in the past that has previously evaded us, as Hegel would express the matter. And the emergence changes the historical playing field once and for all, not just directly in contemporary time and in the future, but even indirectly, projected onto the past. For this reason an emergence is not just a completely new phenomenon that appears in conjunction with a higher degree of complexity in the underlying structure. An emergence is also a truer phenomenon than the preceding phenomena further down in the hierarchy to the extent that the emergence per se enables a deeper understanding of the hierarchy as a whole.

This applies to social emergences just as much as physical emergences. Biology brings something new to chemistry as such, which in turn brings something new to physics as such. In the same way that the Internet brings something new to the mass media from precisely a mass medial perspective, which in turn adds something to written language as such. How could the potentialities of physics or written language be apparent to us today without their subsequent and amplifying historical actualisations? This becomes even clearer when one brings into the argument the fact that there are no laws that make these emergences necessary in advance in our contingent universe. As Hegel very correctly points out, the actualisations only appear as necessary afterwards for us constant rewriters of history. The reason for this is that the emergences – in contrast to, for example, the phase transitions in physics – are not preprogrammed within the phenomena that are located in the hierarchy’s lower tier. The emergences are completely contingent phenomena. They thus arise ex nihilo at a certain, arbitrary moment, without, as is the case with the phase transitions, having been built into the lower tiers from the start.

Since relationalism drives the new physics, it is hardly surprising that the metaphysics of the Internet age – from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek – revolves around and is driven by the notion of the emergent event. Interactivity produces a class structure with the netocracy as the upper class and the consumtariat as the lower class. While the consumtariat is relatively uniform – consumtarians are of course defined by what they are not rather than what they actually are – the netocracy can be divided into three distinct categories. The first of these is the netocratic pioneers; the second category is the netocratic aspirationists who copy the pioneers at an early stage and successfully, and if possible milk an even greater surplus value out of their creativity than the pioneers do: imitation is the mother of survival. The third category of netocrats is the experimentalists, who, while they initially fail in copying the pioneers and who are rather too late to copy the aspirationists, for precisely this reason they are forced to and subsequently succeed in inventing their own original solutions, which motivate their position within the netocracy. The consumtarians meanwhile have their plate full passively chewing the nonsensical content, the calming and soporific entertainment that is produced in various trashy networks with no status whatsoever.

The individual was constructed by the Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century, both to give the growing bourgeoisie a new human ideal – there has scarcely been any stronger individual than the 19th century Napoleonic industrialist – and to get the literate workers in capitalism’s factories and the nation states’ armies to obey orders and work hard without being able to complain about or protest against the state of things. Therefore the gospel of progress was connected to faith in the individual. The progress mythology is the conviction that as a reward for their toil every generation of workers and civil servants will be better off than the previous generation, thanks to the increased productivity that bestows an increased affluence on the entire national community, which quite simply points towards the workers’ offspring one day, in a distant future beyond the horizon, at last being fully-fledged individuals.

But when the individual no longer functions in a society built on networks, the Internet age’s netocracy seeks a new human ideal. One does this while the consumtariat also desperately seeks a new potential identity other than the tragic state of being the last individual. The new, attentionalist human ideal that appears is the dividual, the divisible rather than indivisible Man (see The Body Machines), a body experiencing pleasure, involved in constant networking with all interesting humans and machines in its surroundings. The dividual is a protean creature, powerfully coloured by schizoid creativity. If we study the netocratic categories more closely, we see how the concepts dividual and event interact in a clear quest to capture and strengthen the new attentionalist human ideal.

The netocratic pioneers build and lead the netocratic networks. In contrast to capitalist leadership, they lead from below and not from above. This means that they work purposefully with liberating the joy and creativity of other netocrats, and when this happens the event arises as confirmation and reward, for and within the network. The copying aspirationists follow the pioneers’ templates and set up the networks that in turn raise the status of the pioneers’ networks in the network pyramid as a whole. The Internetified physical world is already full of these obvious spinoffs, from the TEDx conferences (small-scale versions of the TED conferences in California and Canada) to regional burns (small-scale versions of the participatory Burning Man festival in Nevada), and then these various examples are nothing at all in comparison with the powerful network pyramids that are growing online with the Syntheist Movement – who are already practising what we are building a theory about in this book – as a striking example.

But the netocracy would not be the formidable power elite of the Internet age if it did not concurrently comprise the third category: the experimentalists who fail to, or for various reasons quite simply neglect to, copy the netocratic leaders and therefore find their own ways towards attentional success. These netocrats build a dividuality which is so attractive for the established networks that these seek out and incorporate them in their agendas rather than the other way around, and it is in the meeting between these headstrong outliers and the most potent networks that new events arise all the time. There is thus a third possibility outside the seemingly cynical or busily copying strategies to become part of the netocracy, and it goes via pure creativity, exposed vis-à-vis the networks as an eventist dividuality. But the third category, the experimentalists, must not be mistaken for an expression or an updated variety of the discarded individuality. Because in the network society individuality no longer has any value at all. It is merely offensive, and it is only when the dividual is connected with the netocracy that the dividual gets her agential value. It is the network that gives the agent her value in the relationalist society and not the other way around.

An event is a spectacular occurrence, a revolution is a spectacular event, and a singularity is a spectacular revolution. Events of various importance take place several times per year, genuine revolutions only once or twice per millennium. Singularities are easily counted, from an anthropocentric perspective we can only be said to have gone through three singularities: the commencement of the Universe, the genesis of life and the birth of consciousness. The question is whether we can imagine such a fourth singularity. For syntheism however the answer is clear. The fourth singularity must be God’s entry into history. For whatever it is that would be able to match the weight of the emergent genesis of existence, of life and of consciousness earlier in history, for the people of today it must have the same weight as if God suddenly appeared. Whatever it is that is hiding beyond the fourth dimension, its right and only name is God. Thereby the interesting question is what the arrival of God might be and what forms it might assume.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou, one of Jacques Lacan’s most well-known successors, starting with his work Being and Event, constructs a complete philosophical system based on the informationalist event as the deepest truth about Man’s existence. The biological, mental, and social structures that characterise Man are empirically verifiable generalities, and as such are of course contingent. The truths we produce and know of are dependent on this contingency, which summarises them all. Being is not everything to Man, as the totalist philosophers imagine. Thinking can very well be constructed with its starting point in ontology’s constant inconsistency instead of using the fictive being as the basis. However, Badiou argues that the universal is independent on the contingency. Every singularity in itself consists of an infinitely internal chaos, but through the singularity’s internalisation of this chaos, a kind of encircling stability is created around the chaos which makes the universal’s identity possible. From a geometric perspective, we can express this by saying that it is the stable ring around what is transient and chaotic that is the actual singularity; a stable universe around chaotic matter, a stable life around a chaotic biology, a stable consciousness around a chaotic hodgepodge of thoughts, followed by God as a kind of stable ring around a chaotic future.

Badiou assumes that thinking is universality’s true element. In the same way that the event arises as a result of the circumstances that prevail where it materialises – not in the capacity of the event per se – the universal stands above and free from the chaotic contingency. A truth is derived from the set of circumstances under which it is produced – regardless of whether these circumstances are social, psychological, or cognitive – but only the truth that satisfies Badiou’s specific criteria for an authentic truth can be regarded as a universal. It is here that Badiou uses the concept singularity. The authentic truth is characterised by the fact that it is in fact a singularity; it cannot in itself be subordinated to any particular previous particularity, group or identity. And it arises through an act, through an intervention, which establishes a subject/object relation within a specific, larger phenomenon. Waves become particles, chaos becomes cosmos, mobility is eternalised, and so on. Thereby a genuine truth can be established, after which there is no way back whatsoever.

A central theological idea for Badiou is that the singular in the universal has no name. Badiou therefore calls this truth substance the unnamable. It is thus the unnamable at the innermost core of truth that makes it axiomatic. The unnamable for Badiou is of course merely another name for the fundamental syntheological concept of Atheos. Badiou argues that there can be no love or loyalty towards anything unless this love and loyalty first goes via Atheos as its productive engine. Only by devoting oneself to the void as precisely a void can truth be produced and set in motion. Even if Badiou calls Atheos the unnamable, it is not about a destructive but rather a highly productive void. This contrasts with how Slavoj Zizek, another prominent Lacanian, describes Atheos as the excremental remainder that is the subject’s and thereby the truth’s foundation. Zizek may by all means ascribe whatever attributes he wishes to Atheos; at any rate this attribution says more about the philosopher’s emotional fetishes than about the actual nature of Atheos. But the fact remains: the effect of Atheos – and it is the effect and not the character that is interesting – is an enormous productivity, both in the external world of physics and in Man’s internal world.

According to Badiou every universal is born in an event, an event that is impossible to predict in advance, and which therefore first of all occurs in the subconscious. Furthermore, a universal is characterised by being based on a sudden decision, where it gives value to something that was worthless before the decision. The universal creates meaning; it implies an ethical approach, and thereby also a specific course of action from all those who are involved in its genesis. The universal can, at least initially, only have one meaning for those most closely involved. The universal is a univocality. It gets its value from an unswerving loyalty to the consequences of its truth – not through long, drawn-out interpretation of its meaning. This means that Badiou is strongly critical of post-structuralism’s obsession with interpretation, which has received enthusiastic support within the academic world. He despises the postmodern paralysation, which he traces to what we call the hyperhermeneutic condition.

The academic establishment’s monopoly on critical thinking – which is already regrettable in itself, since it effectively shuts out life-giving impulses from outside – has placed thinking in a vicious circle of interpretations of interpretations: a collective, somnambulist movement towards a vegetative passivity without any critical questioning whatsoever or any social activism directed towards the statist-corporatist complex that controls late capitalist society as a whole. This relationship is illustrated by the fact that research is conducted on old philosophy rather than any new critical thinking being created. The question we must ask ourselves is why, under late capitalism, the academic world should be better at thinking critically – critical of precisely the system that, by definition, it is an integral and moreover fundamental part of – than other old and in the same sense corrupt institutions in history. This would be like us expecting the Catholic Church during the 18th century to create the Enlightenment and kill God. One does not tend to bite the hand that feeds one, at least not deliberately and consistently.

Since an outwardly directed criticism would imperil today’s comfortable status quo and force undesirable changes, all energy is instead directed inwardly. Research takes over philosophy. And one thing we learn from history is that corrupt, clerical elites in every era have devoted considerable resources to the interpreting of signs and numerology. In the light of this, our age’s academic obsession with hermeneutics appears to be completely according to the programme and logical in terms of self-interest. Therefore the new netocratic elite must establish new and independent institutions – filled with knowledgeable and innovative netocratic thinkers or eternalists (see The Netocrats), without connections to nation states or big capitalist corporations – in order to get informationalist truth production started. This must occur unconditionally outside of the academic world, which cannot very well welcome and promote these new and free institutions without condemning itself.

Here Badiou has an important point: hermeneutics is the opium of the academic world. Against the cultural relativist curse of hermeneutics he pits mathematics as an opposite pole and as corrective: only through mathematics does he see contact with the real as possible; only through mathematics can Man think being. Badiou’s obsession with the possibilities of mathematics is a direct consequence of the fact that his master Jacques Lacan insists that language must be regarded as an ontological network that can only lie above, and thus both excludes and acts independently of, the real. Where language is based on an eternal stacking of vague abstractions, mathematics is instead concrete and exact. Not least thanks to its enormous accuracy within quantum physics, mathematics has proven its credibility in the role as a bearer of philosophical realism. Idea and flow are merged in mathematics; the difference between eternalism and mobilism is prised up, the vision of an eternalism that is more than just a temporary freezing in perception is realised, and a model-dependent realism becomes possible.

In his work, Badiou in particular discusses the theological revolution that is introduced with Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. The reason why Cantor’s calculations are called transfinite is that with them he proves that a greater cardinality (a measure of the size of a quantity) is always possible. Mathematics can very well provide a number for the totality, but never totalise the number per se. Cantor quite simply proves that mathematics is always open, and then, according to Badiou, there is no reason that physics also could be open either. Cantor’s transfinite mathematics thereby pulls the rug out from under the totalist tradition within philosophy and theology, and at the same time, it confirms the mobilist tradition’s sudden upper hand under informationalism. Zoroaster and Heraclitus all at once appear considerably more contemporary and clear-sighted than Paul and Plato.

The theological consequence of Cantor’s transfinite number series is that they confirm and formalise the dogma of negative theology: God is the nothingness! Beyond all multiplicities there lies a solid and overwhelming emptiness. And what name does this Badiouian, ontological emptiness go under if not Atheos, the engine of the multiplicities and existence within syntheology? Whether one then like Badiou decides to regard Cantor’s mathematical revolution as the final proof that the Abrahamic God does not exist, as atheism thought through to its ultimate conclusion; or like Cantor himself one throws Entheos into the game and chooses as a point of departure that the transfinitude in itself is God – a thought that gets strong support from the American syntheist Leon Niemoczynski for example – in the syntheological, always pragmatist sense, it does not matter at all. What is important, according to both Badiou and Niemoczynski, is to accept and to act based on the ethical decision through the power from the unnamable, which is the foundation of and constitutes the decision itself as such. The foundation is always called Atheos, as F W J Schelling would express it.

Badiou defends the mobilist position with the relationalist argument that the pure multiplicity must be the ethical starting point. Syntheologically, this means that Badiou converts the unnamable into Pantheos. The Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas – another of Cantor’s most famous philosophical interpreters, and the one who probably lies closest to Cantor’s own persuasion concerning the theological consequences of transfinite mathematics – defends the eternalist position in a radically inverse way with the relativist argument that the One must be the starting point. Thereby Levinas chooses to follow the opposite path, seemingly on a direct collision course with Badiou, and converts Pantheos into the unnamable. And it is precisely here, in the dramatic meeting between Badiou and Levinas on ethics’ tautly strung tightrope, that syntheism appears most clearly as the social theory of everything par excellence. Since syntheism comprises the entire syntheological pyramid – and therefore understands the origins and supports the pathos of both Badiou and Levinas – it maintains of course that both alternatives are correct. The ethical act in this context is to choose any of these alternatives and then faithfully act in accordance with this decision.

Never before has the ethical imperative of the truth as an act been clearer. What then follows in a Badiouian scenario is that the activism that emanates from the three unnamable names Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos builds the stable foundation for Syntheos, the formalisation and realisation of the utopia. Since syntheism’s mobilist universe is both contingent and indeterministic, obviously Syntheos cannot be realised through the historical objective’s mystical, eschatological arrival, in keeping with what Marxism and the Abrahamic religions so imaginatively preach. Syntheos is instead realised through a focused but nomadic, creative activism in a capricious, contingent universe, driven by the hope of the impossible suddenly appearing and being realised as the fourth singularity – an idea which is consummated by being theologised by Badiou’s declared syntheist disciple Quentin Meillassoux. The lesson from both Badiou and Levinas is that life-long devotion to truth as an act is the innermost existentialist substance of metaphysics.

The concept truth as an act is central in understanding syntheist utopianism’s refusal to be either optimistic or pessimistic. It is possible, not to say likely, that the great majority of people will always turn with sparkling eyes towards the charismatic authority up on one stage or another and demand an answer as to whether she is an optimist or pessimist in terms of the future, but even to formulate this question in a reasonable way requires so many nuances and so much clarification that a meaningful reply for mass consumption is impossible to imagine at all. The syntheist who protects her integrity and values a serious discussion about the future naturally declines, in a friendly but firm way, to express an opinion. This is where epistemology is replaced by ethics. It is here that we must refer to faith and its possibilities and to reject the demand for certain knowledge.

First of all syntheism assumes that time is real in a contingent universe. This makes all predictions extremely uncertain, at least in the long-term, just like within meteorology or ecology. But there is also a built-in paralysis in the faith in some kind of generally positive or predominantly negative development. Whether the expectations tip this way or that way basically does not matter; merely the fact that the expectations tip in any direction whatsoever weakens the will to act. If the driving existentialist principle in syntheist ethics is that truth is an act – you are everything if you act, you are nothing if you do not act and are content to react – it has the consequence that if the actor is to maximise his or her opportunities for power and influence, all predictions concerning the future must start from an absolute neutral position. The future is not better or worse in any objective sense: meliorism is fundamentally mendacious, the mythology of doom likewise, the future is merely open, full stop. It is from this prediction-neutral starting point that the syntheist ethical imperatives can be formulated. The impossible is possible – if you want to be associated with truth: act!

Badiou maintains that every universal singularly is open vis-à-vis the future and remains constantly unfinished. It is not concerned with our mortality or general fragility. He sums up universality as the faithful construction of an infinite, generic multiplicity where the multiplicity must be primary since the One is merely a verbal illusion (that is, the One is the eternalised fictive par excellence, if we use a syntheological vocabulary). Multiplicity is merely a linguistic singular; any singular outside the irreducible plurality does not exist. Every universality is exceptional, has its origin in a single emergence, is assembled step by step, is the consequence of an existential decision, generates an ethical subject and is based on a becoming in an active truth and not on any specific knowledge. Badiou argues that philosophy obviously comprises the art of analysing, but above all is the art of articulating universalities. The truth event arises, according to him, ex nihilio. To begin with, this event is invisible rather than obviously identifiable where and when it occurs. It is not possible to predict or trace based on the circumstances around the situation where it occurs. Instead the truth event gets its status from the faithful subsequently, and its general acceptance is determined by the strength and perseverance of the faithful, their loyalty. It is quite simply the faithful who must make the event true; it can only get its status as a singularity by means of an aesthetic retrospectivity.

The singularity is defined by the fact that it overthrows the prevailing rules of the game, it begins a new era, it sends out a powerful shock wave through the ethical subject, which is changed so radically that we must speak of a kind of rebirth. Note that the truth event is always internal, it occurs from the inside out rather than from the outside in. It can thus not be forced by some external power that invades the phenomenon in some mysterious way. This means that, for example, military interventions and incoming meteorites are never events in this specific sense. This is where Badiou’s ethical imperative breaks radically with Kant’s moral imperative. According to Kant, Man becomes an authentic individual by carrying out his duty. According to Badiou, it is instead a necessity to oppose the external norm, vis-à-vis the accepted duty. According to Badiou, it is this opposition to the norm and not the fulfilment of duty that is the condition for living subjectivity. The singularity is a cultural and not a natural phenomenon. Badiou’s ethical imperative entails that Man becomes an authentic dividual by opposing the prevailing norm and fighting for a new world order with an eye to the syntheist utopia.

If the truth is an act that generates an event, the genuine event creates a new truth. The truth event is followed by a decision that is followed by a loyalty vis-à-vis the decision about the truth. Aside from this there is no truth beyond the event. Here Badiou breaks radically with Karl Popper’s obsession with verification as the guarantor of truth. Badiou argues that verifications take decades to construct and that the proponents of truth wisely enough never wait for the verification before they act on the basis of the truth. He thus defends an active truth concept vis-à-vis Popper’s extremely reactive truth concept. He then divides up the development of the truth event into four phases which we go through, both as dividual truth actors and as an historical collective.

1. The revelation of the truth event.
2. The denial of the event as the truth.
3. The repression of the event as truth.
4. The resurrection the truth as the event.

But what happens to rationalism’s idea of truth as the correct assertion about existence? Like all other forms of transrationalism from Hegel onwards, syntheism does not deny that such a deepest truth about existence actually exists. But the enormous complexity in such a deepest truth, and the insufficiency of language and thought when it comes to even getting close to it, makes it unattainable. However not in the Kantian sense – where the noumenal object ends up outside our horizon because the phenomenal object gets in the way – but instead as a considerably more radical consequence of transfinite mathematics.

The truth about existence is so deep, so complex, so multifaceted, that it is impossible to reach, since it lies infinitely far from the outermost limit of Man’s perception and the power of mankind’s imagination (designed by the process of evolution for functional orientation in our environment, not for revealing the truth), on the other side of the border to psychosis. This means that quite irrespective of whether Man likes it or not, he is forced to outsource the deepest truth to theological mysticism. For what is the concept of God seen at the deepest level, if not the ultimate truth about existence which Man, with his mental limitations, never can reach? We therefore place the deepest truth with Syntheos, the God that we create based on the insight into our mental limitations, and we place it in the open-ended future, while at the same time we generate both scientific and existential truths through our actions. The truth as an act is not just the most important principle within ethics; according to transrationalism it is also the only possible truth within epistemology.

To philosophise is to metathink, and what Jacques Lacan calls the real and what Badiou calls the unnamable is philosophy’s eternal variability, its own built-in impossibility, its genesis that consistently avoids transitioning into a becoming. Here Badiou stubbornly opposes Gilles Deleuze’s process philosophical foundation: where Deleuze in following Spinoza states that multiplicity is identical with the One, that multiplicity is univocal, Badiou argues that multiplicity is undefinable. He accuses Deleuze of building a lovely constructivism that relies entirely on intuition, while he himself relies only on the stringency of mathematics. Against this Spinozist and Deleuzian multiplicity of the One (Entheos through Pantheos) he posits the multiplicity of emptiness (Entheos through Atheos), an emptiness that is a non non-being. Only in this ontological equation of multiplicity and emptiness does Badiou see the possibility of correctly reflecting the nature of multiplicity. It is only when somebody gets the energy from Atheos to formulate the truth that the truth becomes an event.

We return to syntheism as the social theory of everything, and of course it accommodates both the Deleuzian and the Badiouian variants of pathos. Deleuze’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Pantheos, while Badiou’s entheist multiplicity takes its point of departure in Atheos. Deleuze is the pantheological prophet, Badiou is the prophet of atheology, and entheology is the oscillation between these two antipoles; a movement that is completed through the addition of Syntheos to the syntheological pyramid. In the midst of this earth-shattering oscillation, Deleuze and Badiou, the event’s two prophets above all others, are in agreement that what is most important for the syntheist is the decision to enter at least one of the temples that is devoted to either Pantheos or Atheos and engage in its activities, while the ethically reprehensible thing to do is to remain passively outside. Both these temples are needed as foundations. Both these temples fill us with wonder and produce spiritual truth. Deleuze’s pantheology moves in the direction of Entheos, Badiou’s atheology reaches out towards Syntheos. It is pantheology that makes us appreciate the existential intensity of existence, to further develop pantheism into entheism, while it is atheology that drives us to long for the fulfilment of the utopia and which makes us consummate atheism via its deepening in syntheism.

In the second part of the Futurica Trilogy, The Global Empire, we describe in detail how the perceptive eternalisation of the mobilist chaos of existence is necessary in order for us to be able to act, while mobilism is eternalism’s always present, demonic shadow. In that sense, ontology is the secondary eternalisation of the primary mobilism, the presentation of the unpresentable as a schematic model, the objectification of the emptiness of the void. This perception transforms the multiplicity into functional fictives; models that the mind must be allowed to tinker with in order to be able to mobilise an overview and organise a meaningful and relevant activity at all. Badiou puts the eternalisation of the phenomenon on an equal footing with the mathematisation of existence. Infinity takes precedence over finitude, ontology is the same thing as mathematics. He then continues to the need for the situation, Badiou’s concept for the structured presentation of the multiplicity, a kind of consolidating theatrical performance of sundry fictives. Only in the right situation is the truth event possible, argues Badiou. He is inspired here by both St Paul and Vladimir Lenin: for these thinkers, the timing is not just a matter of strategic necessity: it also has a significant ethical dimension. Waiting for the right moment for the action faithful to the truth is an important component in Badiou’s ethics: the timing is a central aspect of the loyalty itself.

So what then is the fundamental event – the event through which all other events are reflected – if not death? A longing for immortality – even if it is highly present in both Badiou and Meillassoux – is initially nothing other than a longing for death as death, in contrast to the will to survival as a longing for life as life. Only from its finality can anything at all gain a meaning, only through its transience can life be worth living. Without mortality, life and existence lose all intensity. The will to survival therefore oscillates between three poles: first a seeking of existential intensity, thereafter a desire for the prolongation of life in order to maximise this seeking. However, this seeking and this desire can only take place by virtue of the third pole’s guarantee of life’s indisputable finiteness. This guarantee of obliteration is thus in itself the third pole. In its full extent, eternity in the Abrahamic sense is namely an idea as unbearable as Hell itself, while life in its strongest intensity of the experience of here and now, seen against the backdrop of its transience as the infinite now – the syntheist event par excellence – is the holiest thing that exists. Thus consciousness always operates on the basis of death as the ultimate guarantor of the very will to life. To live is to die. But not at precisely this moment. Later.

Informationalism’s obsession with the event – that is, informationalism’s the event as the equivalent of monotheism’s eternity and individualism’s progress as the metaphysical engines that produce the dynamics within each of these paradigms – is driven by a greater fascination in the face of, and an obsession with, death than ever before in history. Regardless of whether we see Man’s deepest longing as a quest for survival (the driving force behind Pantheos) or as a quest for immortality (the driving force behind Atheos), we return to our obsession with death. Death as a concept thus operates constantly in the oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos. But what then does our obsession consist of? What is it that drives Badiou to turn all forms of meaning into a meaning based on a suddenly arisen truth event, which in turn reflects death?

Convention says that death frightens us with all the pain, sorrow, loneliness, powerlessness and mystery with which it is associated. But even if the pain, sorrow and loneliness are factored out, the fascination still remains the same. Thus the powerlessness and mystery remain. In other words, death frightens us by how it reveals our powerlessness and lack of knowledge. It humiliates us all, not least those of us who have had power and social status during our lifetimes. It strips us of anthropocentric internarcissism. But death also reveals our existential banality, our entirely non-existent significance for the Universe. And what frightens us most of all is how death reveals our own lack of significance for the divine, that is, for Pantheos. At the deepest level, the Christian lie is that each and every one of us means something to God, that we are actually a desirable lot and cherished jewels for a god who thus has nothing better to do than to sit and coddle us and the likes of us (literally) in all eternity, like a dead robot god surrounded by dead rag dolls.

What death then reveals is of course how little we mean, how little we will be missed after our decease, how simply and almost offensively painlessly life goes on without us. And what we feel guilty about at the deepest level is the lack of guilt when other people die and disappear for good from our own lives. Life goes on: what else should it do? It is precisely here that death constantly chafes against our existential experience. We can never motivate for ourselves precisely why we should be so interesting and important for Pantheos that Pantheos would need to maintain us after death for Pantheos’ own sake. It is not a desire for immortality that drives us; merely a banal fear of death as the definite singularity after which nothing is the same any more. The postponement of this event is the will to survival, and this will is formalised through all the other lesser events to which we ascribe a decisive importance during both our own history and the history of all of humanity.

Quentin Meillassoux formulates his radical utopianism in L’inexistence divine, a work published in instalments which, at the time of writing, is not yet complete. According to him, the history of the Universe contains three decisive leaps that cannot be understood as any originally built-in phase transitions – as totalists from Plato to Einstein imagine them to be – but rather as contingent emergences that suddenly appear from nowhere and out of anything, and which radically change existence, without thus having any mysterious qualities at all. Physics does obviously obey certain specific laws in our part of space–time, but physics per se does not obey any preordained laws whatsoever – it is instead radically contingent. For example, the Universe as a whole can evidently expand considerably faster than the speed of light, which the existence of cosmic inflation proves with abundant clarity. The laws of physics, or rather its behaviour or habits, can therefore change however and whenever, and without us being consulted about the matter. Otherwise, these behaviours would be compelled to precede the physics that they are deemed to regulate and the natural sciences have never found any support for any such mystical non-material pre-existence of the laws of nature. This is quite simply a matter of a somewhat embarrassing logical error, and a projection of this kind of bizarre metalaw of existence means if anything a depressing return to Newton’s unfounded assumption of an external creator of the Universe, which this creator thus precedes (which of course constitutes the beginning of an unspeakably tedious and meaningless regression without end: who created the creator, who created the creator of the creator, and so on).

Meillassoux argues that the first singularity is the genesis of existence per se, the second singularity occurs at the genesis of life and the third singularity occurs at the genesis of thinking. He then takes a giant leap into the future and argues that in a contingent world a fourth revolution of the same importance is both possible, likely and above all desirable, and then in true syntheist spirit he casts God in the role of the fourth, and for mankind the final, step. We write in true syntheist spirit, not just because Syntheos is the created God placed in the future, but also because Meillassoux declares that his concept of God is to be understood based on the dogma that a belief in God’s existence does not entail that one believes in God, but that one believes in existence. There is in Meillassoux, as in all syntheists, no way around or out of the theological project. Metaphysics is not a choice, but an absolute necessity that everything else is fundamentally dependent upon.

Meillassoux bases his philosophical system on four concepts: potentiality, contingency, virtuality and chance. These constitute two spheres of being. At the local level, potentiality is pitted against chance; at the global level virtuality is pitted against contingency. His Syntheos is justice, where justice consummates a history that runs via existence, life and thinking as the previous immanent miracles. Note that according to Meillassoux, a miracle is to be understood as proof that God does not exist. Rather, miracles open up the possibility of the Universe being God – a universe as a god that expresses itself to itself. But as the radical indeterminist that Meillassoux is, he opens the way for the possibility that justice never occurs (a reminder of the neutral position of Badiouian ethics). And above all, Meillassoux claims that justice can never occur unless it is first desired. His god is thereby the Marxist god par excellence. But it is a contingent Marxist god in an indeterministic world with a wide-open future, a singularity that Karl Marx himself would scarcely have understood.

However, we pose the question of whether the syntheist community shares Meillassoux’s dream of the resurrection of the dead before a suddenly existing god whose essence is called justice really is the God that we long for, and which thereby can act as a utopian engine for us in our time. Do we ever actually desire something that actually later occurs? Is it not the case that both emergent and contingent phenomena occur only of their own accord – as both Hegel and Nietzsche maintain – and that we only afterwards place them in our value hierarchies? It appears undeniably as considerably more reasonable to speak of the growth of the Internet in the late 20th century as the genesis of a – if only afterwards – desired god, rather than as any form of justice as a god located in the distant future at the end of a road which in any case is filled with thousands and thousands of other paradigm-shifting events. Meillassoux’s future is quite simply neither consistent with his radical contingency, nor sufficiently open to the future to be able to act as an engine for syntheist activism. However, it is unarguably a formidable foundation on which to build potential utopias.

Meillassoux’s British colleague Simon Critchley defines the syntheist faith as a pure faith in his syntheist epic The Faith of The Faithless. Critchley argues that it is faith per se and not its object that is utopianism’s innermost essence. He calls his conviction mystical anarchism, and this is of course identical with the theological anarchism that we formulate in this work. From this position, there is then nothing that stops us from taking one further step; from the pure faith of mystical anarchism to syntheism’s pure religion, a spirituality in which the religious practice in itself is the innermost essence of the religion. In the spirit of Critchley, the pure religion’s basic faith is in the idea that faith itself is necessary in order to make the impossible possible. Creativity runs from Atheos via Pantheos to Entheos, and the name of the enabled impossibility is of course Syntheos. Pure faith in a practised form is thus syntheism, the pure religion. As pure religion, religion is alienation’s complete opposite and the only available weapon against the cynical isolationism in our contemporary world. Critchley’s answer to the question of what must be done in our time is identical with syntheism’s subtraction and its ensuing monastisation; he has had enough of the classical Left’s bloody cultural revolutions – led by malicious and irresponsible tyrants and fanned by pompous and adventure-loving philosophers – who quite apart from wreaking great havoc and destruction, sooner or later are always absorbed by precisely the power structures that they purport to attack, and thereby in the long run actually strengthening rather than weakening them. This occurs since this sort of revolutionary, just like the quantum physics researcher, is internal and not external in relation to the relationalist society within which she acts. Subtraction must therefore always precede the revolution as truth as an act.

Meillassoux’s contribution to syntheist thinking is obviously both welcome and exciting. This is true, not least of his concept hyperchaos: absolutely everything is contingent. Even the change per se is contingent. Existence has no sense. Instead non-sense rules. The world does not contradict itself, but operates within a permanent condition of non-sense and constant change in all directions and on all levels. At the same time, a universe that finds itself in hyperchaos might very well be consistent. Hyperchaos does not mean that the Universe must be unstable. Contingency is thus something completely different from just chance. Here Meillassoux, just like Badiou, gets inspiration from Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. The laws of physics can be suddenly changed, but as long as they function they are extremely stable. Here both Badiou and Meillassoux open the way for a new realism: mathematics can measure physics in such an exact way that we can experience the world around us almost precisely as it is.

Here mathematics distinguishes itself clearly from language, and here there is thus an opening of the door to the noumenal, the door that Kant believes he has closed. However, Meillassoux ends up in a return to the Paulinist dream of merging the Jewish religion with Greek philosophy and its main current, Platonism. This is apparent in his resistance to the pagan circularity, which for many syntheists is what drives the connection back to previous monist civilisations before the growth and spread of Abrahamic, dualist monotheism. Meillassoux has a fondness for referring to Paul, while other syntheists find a compact monism within quantum physics on which to build their world view and argue that anything else would be dishonest. When other syntheists welcome God per se as Syntheos rather than God as some kind of specific property – God’s attribute is for them as secondary as the attributes of a beloved human being – he challenges us with his God as justice.

Meillassoux is inspired by both Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, who also build utopian systems around the event, informationalism’s metaphysical centre. The event is a dramatically altering event that suddenly just happens and then changes the course of history in a decisive manner. Small events occur constantly in the dividual’s life or in the local social arena, but the real singularities affect the future of both humanity and the planet for good. Events such as the invention of spoken language, written language, the printing press and the Internet have even generated completely new historical paradigms with new power structures, followed by new metaphysicists who have taken over the world and defeated old paradigms and narratives. Consequently with the advent of informationalism, we are compelled to rewrite all of history into a history of events in order to make it comprehensible and relevant for ourselves and for future generations.

However much Meillassoux, Badiou and Zizek emphasise the immanent in their longed-for, utopian events, they all finally end up in a strong and culture-specific transcendentalisation of their imagined visions. In the spirit of Kant, the subject is still free from the object and tries to tame the object according to its own limited and above all closed fantasy in relation to the future. For Meillassoux, the utopia is the arrival of justice as a future divinity, but exactly what this justice consists of – and how it is related to Man’s, until now necessary, focus on survival within a decisive existential experience of finality – this Meillassoux never succeeds in answering. It is therefore sometimes tempting to call him our time’s version of the beautiful soul in Hegel’s sarcastic sense, since Meillassoux likes to use fancy concepts that however lack a clear anchoring in modern Man’s immanent reality. Meanwhile Badiou and Zizek mix the boys’ room’s fascination with war toys and violent video games with a romantic passion for macho tyrants and bloody revolutions, such as the 1960s’ student protests in Europe. From this nostalgically coloured hybrid, they squeeze out the event as yet another bloody revolution.

For Zizek, revolutionism is even necessary on an ontological level. Just like his role model Lenin, Zizek claims that revisionism – the step-by-step transition to the Communist society – is impossible, since every step in the revisionist process salvages too much of what is reprehensible in the pre-revolutionary society, things that only the revolution can wipe out. Therefore the revolution is both desirable and necessary, and therefore, according to Zizek, it is the only authentic event. A radically immanent interpretation of the concept of revolution would however reply that both the bloody demonstrations on the streets and the realisations of a far-off personified justice – to the extent that they take place at all – actually are only marginal expressions among many others of the real, underlying revolution. This revolution is instead always a long drawn-out process, precisely a step-by-step but at the same time non-linear revision which starts with a revolutionary change of the material conditions (for example the Internet’s emergence as the manifestation of Syntheos), followed by a revolutionary change in social practices (syntheism’s high-tech participatory culture), which in turn is followed by a revolutionary change in intersubjective metaphysics (syntheism’s subtraction, monastisation and psychedelic practices), which only thereafter can lead to the longed-for social event (the syntheist utopia, the syntheological pyramid’s completion), where the power structure hopefully can be adjusted, more or less dramatically, in order to liberate the new paradigm’s creative potential.

Badious’ and Zizek’s hero Hegel would be the first to criticise their bloody boys’ room dreams as typical examples of shallow internarcissism. For Hegel, history is merely a long metahistory of constant re-writings of history, where an obsessive narrative production is a consistently failing but nonetheless necessary adaptation to an uncontrollable immanent flow. The revolution and the event must therefore be separated from each other. The revolution occurs in secret and its radicalness can only be attributed to it retroactively. The event assumes its dramatic and transforming consequences only a long time afterwards. As an example we might mention that Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press around 1450. But the French Revolution was not launched until 1789. So there is a gap of all of 339 years between the immanent and transcendent revolutions in this case. And which of these we build our metaphysics on unfortunately has a decisive significance for where we will later arrive.

The real revolution is of course sparked as early as via the emergent arrival of the printing press, and then goes on until and even past 1789, when it suddenly expresses itself as an event in the bloody uprisings that only later assume the name the French Revolution. While it was actually going on, none of the actors were aware that they were participating in the French Revolution; the mythology in question was created and projected onto the events only afterwards, not least by the Russian revolutionaries who needed an event in the past to reflect themselves in, and from which they could derive both splendour and legitimacy, precisely as Hegel claims is always the case. From the perspective of the history of ideas, the choice is here between prioritising either the immanent revolution 1450–1789 – let us say with an emphasis on an information-technology writing of history – or else the spectacular event in 1789, which only afterwards is reified into a transcendent event within the capitalist-industrialist discourse with the purpose of turning it into a metaphysical inspiration rather than an immanent, narrated event. Thus it is about a cult of mysticism that old revolutionary romantics such as Badiou and Zizek, along with postmodern French nationalists, are reluctant to abandon.

At any rate, what is essential is that the Parisian street riots would be unthinkable without the printing press that became fully and widely accepted in society only after several transforming centuries. It first changed Europe and then the rest of the world beyond recognition, and the French Revolution’s geographical domicile has much more to do with the fact that France was the first country where a majority of the population could read and write than them being extraordinarily innovative or clear-headed. For Badiou and Zizek, it appears necessary to first let the singularity take place, thereafter wait for it to generate a new power structure, only to then wait for a bloody conflict within the new power structure – where the otherwise obese and physically the worse for wear philosophers indeed promise to man the barricades themselves and throw Molotov cocktails at the authorities – only to thereafter be able to speak of a genuine revolution. Hegel would most likely not accept such a static and culture-specific idea of revolution. It was hardly the intention that Paris in 1789 would fix the meaning of the word revolution, which in fact is a metaconcept, for all eternity in the way that the essentially conservative revolutionary romantics Badiou and Zizek assume. That is, with the revolution as the consistently failing, tragic repetition of the event in Paris in 1789, moreover always carried out by angry young men with weapons in their hands and oppressed by an authoritarian tyrant whose boots they love to lick.

It seems, ironically enough, as though Badiou’s and Zizek’s nostalgic notion of revolution suffers from a glaring lack of, precisely, the revolutionarity. The syntheists, on the other hand, have their sights set on something much more radical. The singularity is the definitive event according to the criteria we use in this book. And there are already three parallel revolutions in progress – even if Badiou and Zizek with their conservative templates and blinkers appear unable to apprehend them – namely: The expansion of the Internet, the relationalist paradigm shift within both physics and sociology and last but not least the chemical liberation. The singularity that is our transition from humanity to transhumanity is one of the three revolutions’ merging supraevents in a not too distant future. The fourth singularity in history is already waiting in the wings. All we need to do is take Critchley’s advice which tells us to first build the syntheist temples and monasteries, where through our subtraction from the surrounding world we can enable the revolution as the truth as an act of our time. We are ourselves the fourth singularity!

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58