6 Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion

It represented a major and significant step for philosophy when Friedrich Nietzsche prised it halfway away from correlationism to relationalism; Nietzschean relativism entails a radical departure from the Kantian version of correlationism. There is no longer any fixed relationship between a stable subject and a moving object to use as a starting point. There are only a host of diffuse objects – the human being as an animal body rather than as a rational consciousness is one of these – and the relations between these objects are in constant motion. Relativism is a consequence of there being no fixed point of departure in existence. Without a divine centre – and Nietzsche proclaims, as we know, that God is dead – the position of the first object in a network is completely dependent on the other object’s position, and the second object’s position in the network is in turn completely dependent on the third object’s position, which in turn is dependent on both the first, the second and a fourth object for its position. And so on ad infinitum. Which ultimately involves all objects in the Universe in a kind of massive, abstract, impenetrable spreading out of everything with everything else in constant motion.

If Nietzsche is the godfather of relativism within philosophy, Einstein is relativism’s executive producer and the scientist who consummates relativism in the natural sciences. In an absurdly large universe with an absurd quantity of discrete objects, according to Einstein it is ultimately impossible to establish an objectively valid position for any of the objects at all. All positions in space–time are relative. But it is still a world that consists of discrete objects; their ontological status is not questioned by Nietzsche or Einstein – just the possibility of establishing a valuation. Therefore, the problem with relativism is that it maintains Kant’s rigid division between the subject and the object as an ontological foundation. While Kant’s static construction is set in motion, it is however relativized – everything gets its value only from its relative position – but the correlation between the subject and the object per se is never questioned. Within the confines of relativism, if anything the relationship between the subject and the object is more or less impossible to define precisely, since it appears to concern a kind of insurmountable problem connected to the measuring itself. But that the correlation is still there, and that it is ontologically essential, is established beyond all doubt.

Nietzsche’s ontology opens the way for enormous creativity. It is, for example, a gold mine for Einstein’s relativistic physics. According to both Nietzsche and Einstein, the angle from which the subject observes existence determines absolutely everything. Only in this special perspective can a truth appear, and that truth is of course, like the subject itself, highly temporary and in practice invalid as soon as the moment in question has passed and the conditions have changed. Therefore we speak of the relativist world view as subjectivist rather than objectivist. What remains is only the subject’s own highly private and temporary truth, impossible to convey other than in a more or less desperate attempt at communication through art or poetry, always doomed to be twisted and distorted in the process, always doomed to age and be weeded out as constantly new information arrives.

Nietzschean and Einsteinian relativism is still however a correlationism. The objects are presumed to correlate to each other as noumena rather than as phenomena. Nietzsche still presumes that the objects have a form of essence, that they are internally stable. Einstein makes the corresponding observation within physics with his beloved atoms (he refuses to accept the ontological victory of magical quantum physics over classical physics). According to the relativists, the instability is entirely external. Even if the epistemological correlation between thinking and knowing proposed by Kant is shattered, Nietzsche and Einstein keep the ontological correlation between subject and object. They still live in a world over which Kant casts his imposing shadow. Syntheism, on the other hand, moves on from relativism to its dialectical intensification: relationalism.

The relationalist philosophers Karen Barad, Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux push through and past relativism when, at the start of the 3rd millennium – inspired by pioneers such as the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the physicist Niels Bohr – they construct a speculative materialism that attacks the entire correlationalist paradigm and its fixation with an original subject that correlates with an original object as its ontological foundation. They are quite simply searching for a deeper foundation beyond this premise, which has dominated phenomenology ever since Kant’s heyday. While relativism settles for stating that the relations between the fixed objects are relative – what we call an interactive ontology – the relationalist philosophers maintain that the relations within the phenomena are also mobile in relation to each other – that is, they advocate an intra-acting ontology. There are no discrete objects whatsoever in the Universe. Not even at the minutest micro level. Thus, nor are there any Kantian objects in physical reality, not even any noumenal such; what really exists is merely pure relata, or relations without their own inner substance between and within abstract fields of irreducible multiplicities.

If relativism is philosophy.html">process philosophy’s introductory stage, then relationalism is its consummation. And as philosophy.html">process philosophy’s theological extension, syntheism is the process religion par excellence. Syntheism not only distances itself from dualist totalism; it also rejects the recurring death worship that is closely connected with the totalist ideologies, that is, the anthropocentric and internarcissistic deification of the human being’s own existential effacement. It is our own mortality that makes us obsessed by nothingness and tricks us into regarding it as a reasonable ontological alternative. This is why as widely diverse thinkers as the Buddha, St Augustine and Meister Eckhart are fascinated by the god of negative theology. In various ways they are looking for the possibility to deify the moment of human death, turning death into God. And out of the reverse perspective, the desire is instead to make life and its intensity into the divine foundation for positive theology, whose more or less syntheist proponents include Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze.

Desire in consciousness seeks most of all a kind of constantly dislocated metadesire – every time it looks as though the desire might be satisfied, it quickly shifts its focus to something completely different – the reward of which is the will to survive, since a desire that is never satisfied cannot either ever be content with life as it is, and wants to die. On the other hand, the drive in the subconscious deep down wants to die, that is, it stubbornly wants to return to the cosy absorption into the cosmos which means that the subconscious is spared the pressing desires of consciousness, and that no demanding subject need exist any longer. Consciousness is of course, as most people experience on a daily basis, obsessed with survival. But the subconscious is driven (subconsciously) towards death. The subconscious is namely embedded in the nostalgic longing for the preconscious state in the womb, where everything in existence is interconnected as one single thing – the mother, the child and everything else united in a cosmos free from confounding differences – and life is carefree and free from paradoxes, which would mean that life does need not to be contemplated, it does not need to be made consciousness with toil and pain. What is the symbol for this permanent matrix state, without any of the trying oscillations of change, if not the Buddha’s fragile dream of nirvana?

A central component in syntheism is how it takes a stand for positive and consequently rejects negative theology. To start with, the repression of the drive.html">death drive has a clear function: according to pantheist ethics we live because the Universe seeks its own existence and its own consciousness through us. As conscious beings we are not only part of the Universe; we human beings also together constitute the Universe’s own consciousness of itself. In syntheological terms, we express this as Pantheos emerging into Syntheos through our truth as an act. But syntheism supports positive theology also because it sees time or Entheos as both a physical and ideological foundation. Death has its place at some point along the arrow of time, but the time for death is not now. The present always belongs to survival in consciousness. Syntheism’s activist ethics can therefore only be constructed out of survival as a propelling principle – not from immortality. Totalist death-worshipping moralism is fundamentally just a form of reactionary masochism.

Therefore syntheism finds ideological allies among mobilist philosophers such as Lao Tzu, Leibniz, Hume, Hegel, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson and George Herbert Mead. All of these thinkers are veritable gold mines for syntheology. To take just one example: Heidegger and Deleuze shift the phenomenological focus to the oscillation between Pantheos (becoming) and Atheos (being). Heidegger calls this relational phenomenon finite transcendence, while Deleuze discusses the same thing under the concept of psychic individuation. And it is precisely finite transcendence and psychic individuation that makes possible the transition from philosophy.html">process philosophy to process religion. What then is process religion in practice, if not the collective name for immanent spiritual experiences?

Deleuze advocates a Nietzschean affirmation of the eternal return of the same in constantly returning loops of a kind, without substance of their own, with only minute changes for every revolution, which opens the way for the sudden genesis of emergent novelties, for example in the process-philosophical, artistic search for the genuine expression, or in the process-religious, spiritual search for the genuine impression. Therefore, artistic expression and spiritual experience strive towards the syntheist emergence made sacred, through which they can communicate an actual meaning, impart an existential substance, to the syntheist agent’s existence. The conclusion of this train of thought is that the credible spirituality of our time – which is important when syntheism is compared to competing religious and metaphysical alternatives – can only arise within the confines of the immanent process religion. It is not possible to take other religious and metaphysical alternatives seriously as spiritual projects in the Internet age; they cannot be anything other than guilt-driven nostalgia (like holding on to the religion of one’s parents in spite of it having become irrelevant) or nonsensical superstition (such as New Age and other commercial, exoticised posturing masquerading as spirituality).

While Deleuze finds process-philosophical dynamite in Nietzsche’s thoughts on the cosmic drive, there is no support for a corresponding syntheist renaissance for Nietzsche’s concept of the cosmic desire, that which Nietzsche calls the will to power, his most famous idea. Nietzsche’s analysis of desire is founded in 19th century Romantic mysticism around power, but does not hold water in relationalist physics. His idea of the will to power as a cosmic struggle for finite resources in a finite universe should rather be viewed as relativism’s most magnificent phantasm. While the will to power can most certainly be used creatively as a social-psychological explanatory model for human behaviour – since we live in a world filled with acute shortages and murderous competition – it would immediately collapse as an ontological basis for a universe that is always expanding and growing in complexity, without the need for any specific will or power over an unfounded, presumed competition within a limited sphere that actually does not even exist. Since the Universe has of course no competition in its cosmological existence, projections onto the Universe that assume a fundamental scarcity-and-competition situation do not hold water either. The Nietzschean will to power is thus a psychological attribute, but hardly a universal phenomenon.

A logical consequence of the pioneering M-theory within physics, which was launched by Edward Witten in the mid-1990s, is that the Multiverse in which our Universe is anticipated to be situated always spontaneously creates something. A multiverse always makes sure that there is something in some form, always. In contrast to the human being, the Universe is not in any real sense mortal. This means that the Universe both is and does many different things, but the Universe wants nothing in itself since it does not need to want anything in order to exist in the way that it does. We must instead regard the will to power as a logical consequence of the state of affairs where that which has been endowed with an installed repression mechanism linked to the drive.html">death drive – a mechanism which makes this something believe that it wants to exist rather than wants to be dissolved – trumps that which is conscious of its death wish as long as we find ourselves within a limited sphere with finite resources. However, there is no need whatsoever for this kind of will to power globally or universally, which is why the concept cannot shoulder nor receive the role as the ontological foundation for existence as a whole. The drive belongs in nature, but desire stems from culture. And it is in nature, not in culture, that we find the ontological foundation for mobilist philosophy. The drive is primary and desire is secondary, as Lacan would have answered his predecessor Nietzsche.

This means that the will to power is not any kind of cosmic drive, as Nietzsche thinks it is, but rather a necessary ethical principle, perfectly adapted to a finite creature on a planet permeated by a struggle for limited resources, a position for action and against reaction in the ethical collision between them. With the will to power as an ethical principle, syntheism is – as a doctrine created by people for people – for affirmation and against ressentiment. However, existence operates as an entity as one big oscillation between Atheos (non-existence) and Pantheos (existence) at all levels, with highs and lows of intense oscillations and oscillating intensities. In this Universe, there is only an enormous multiplicity for its own sake, without any need whatsoever of or opening for any particular will or anything to master and thereby have power over. The Universe has no direction whatsoever of the type that the will to power presupposes. Rather, Nietzschean relativism should be regarded as a particularly advanced precursor to the extended relationalism that Whitehead, Deleuze and their successors constructed in the 20th century – for example through adding Leibniz’ and Spinoza’s more radical protorelationalism to Nietzschean philosophy.html">process philosophy – where syntheism quite simply is the name of the process religion that accompanies the Whiteheadian and Deleuzian philosophy.html">process philosophy.

Within philosophy.html">process philosophy, ontology and epistemology are intimately intertwined in each other. Being and the movement interact in such a way that the movement can only be transformed into and apprehended as being through an agglutinative onto-epistemology. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism is the onto-epistemology of the Internet age (see The Global Empire). Contingent reality must be frozen in space–time in order for it to be apprehended and decoded; it must be eternalised. The more factors that interact in such a freezing, the more qualitative the eternalisation becomes. The internal eternalisation must then be set in motion anew and is cast back into the external mobilist reality, and not – however tempting this may be to the Platonist impulse – be misinterpreted as a kind of eternal truth about existence. On the whole syntheist onto-epistemology is not well-served by any eternal truths in a Platonist sense; its utopia is imperfect rather than perfect. On the other hand, it is interested in the enormous intellectual advances that can be achieved when the qualities of truth in precisely the relations between different hypotheses are compared. Truth is not eternal, nor is it relativist – even truth is relationalist.

Eternalisations are not just ontologically but also epistemologically explosive if they are understood and used as precisely relationalist phenomena and nothing else. Syntheologically we can describe the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism as the constantly ongoing oscillations along the axes between on the one hand Atheos and Pantheos, and on the other hand Entheos and Syntheos. Eternalism on its own should be regarded as an outright neurosis; mobilism on its own should be viewed as an equally outright psychosis. The functional balance arises in the dialectic between them where eternalism is also set in motion, is cast back into mobilism, is mobilised, in order to be able to steer perception’s selection of conceivable deviations from previous eternalisations of the enormous, continuous inflows of information to the sense organs. The sum of eternalism and mobilism can never exceed one hundred percent. The stronger the eternalisation, the weaker the mobility; the higher the mobilisation, the lower the eternality.

There is no external god outside the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism. The syntheological concepts of Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos and Syntheos for example are produced within and not outside the dialectic. The fact that nature itself constantly produces new emergences means – as the syntheistic complexity theoretician Stuart Kauffman demonstrates in his book Reinventing The Sacred – that no external god is necessary. The deeper we delve into the relationalist onto-epistemology, the more clearly it generates an ethics of its own in stark contrast to Platonist moralism with its condemnation of movement and change in favour of the eternal being; the perfect and therefore immutable world which does not exist. But relationalist ethics does not maintain some kind of chaos at the expense of the cosmos. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism instead generates entheist ethics. To open oneself up to variability is to affirm the active affirmation. On the other hand, to close oneself off in order to fight variability is to surrender oneself to the reactive ressentiment. Lacan picturesquely describes eternalism as the masculine and mobilism as the feminine pole in the dialectical relation between them. Taoism’s founder Lao Tzu, the entheist philosopher par excellence, of course calls them yin and yang.

It should be added that experimental metaphysics from the 1980s onwards actually proves that the syntheist onto-epistemology is not merely a perceptional phenomenon; it is not perception alone that makes eternalisation necessary and possible. Even physics itself creates eternalisations and mobilisations. Quantum physics starts from wave motions, and when several monochrome wave movements interact and generate a superposition, something near-miraculous appears. The superposition between the wave motions displays clear differences even beyond the obvious interference in each of the individual wave motions; the more monochrome wave motions added to the wave package in question, the more clearly it is localised in space–time. Ultimately, already in physics itself a clear phenomenon becomes apparent: add an infinite number of wave motions and the position is determinised; there are no longer any wavelengths left to speak of, and a particle appears, locked in space. The more fixed the localisation in space, the weaker the wavelength; the stronger the wavelength appears, the more the phenomenon spreads itself out in space. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism is thereby not merely an onto-epistemological complex; the oscillation evidently has an exact equivalent in the complementarity between wave and particle in experimental metaphysics.

The current superpositions in quantum physics cause classical physics to break down. The superpositions are namely in clear opposition to the dogmas of classical physics. The difference between the individual substances of atomic physics on the one hand – which coolly interact in isolation – and the wave motions of relationalist physics’ on the other hand – which are literally subsumed in each other in superpositions, as entangled phenomena – is tangible and has dramatic consequences. Not even Werner Heisenberg’s otherwise much discussed epistemic uncertainty principle captures the magnitude of the current revolution. To embrace the depth of the quantum physics revolution requires instead Niels Bohr’s genuinely pioneering ontic principle of indeterminacy. It is not some kind of built-in uncertainty as one would find in a measurement instrument that is most fundamental and revolutionary for this world view, but rather Bohr’s dazzling proof that we live in an indeterministic universe.

Quantum physics thereby opens the way for a whole new metaphysics, a radical monism connected to an irreducible multiplicity. Kant’s humanist phenomenology no longer has any validity. Starting with Hegel, the way is instead opened for a new phenomenology where the observer always must be included as an actor in every event-constellation, in every individual, fundamental phenomenon. After Hegel’s phenomenological revolution, the Hegelian view of the observer in relation to the observed is fundamental to the field of philosophy.html">process philosophy. Thus, Kantian representationalism and its naive atheism are gradually wiped out in three steps: in the first step by Hegel, in the second step by Nietzsche and in the third step by Bohr. It is with Bohr and his relationalism that we land at the arrival of the Internet age. Ontology, epistemology and even phenomenology are merged into a common relationalist complex. We see how syntheist metaphysics is solidly founded in contemporary physics.

An interesting observation is that the last person who actually defends atomic physics against the devastating attacks of quantum physics is none other than Albert Einstein. He does so in a document authored with his physicist colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in 1935. Bohr answers Einstein and his friends six weeks later. The clash between Einstein and Bohr revolves around Einstein and his colleagues insisting that physics must be based on the idea of solid and discrete objects as the foundation of the discipline. “If physics cannot be occupied with calmly observing, studying, and then formulating eternally valid truths about these objects, what then should physics be doing?”, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen wonder disconcertedly. It is clear that these gentlemen cannot imagine any physics whatsoever beyond physics’ elevated isolation above the examined elements.

Bohr is both surprised and somewhat distressed by this line of argument: suddenly it is clear to him that his highly esteemed colleagues and friends actually do not understand what quantum physics has to tell the world and what this in turn means. Because for Bohr, as early as 1935, it is a given that the physical world’s primary building blocks are not objects, but that the world is instead made up of entanglements: intra-acting, fundamentally plural phenomena, rather than isolated, discrete objects. All the measuring instruments and observers in the world must be regarded as integral components in these phenomena and they must be discounted in every type of calculation and prediction. The independent and separate observer is a dangerous and misleading illusion, argues Bohr. What Einstein and his friends fail to see, and what Bohr’s colleague Erwin Schrödinger discovers, is that one can have full knowledge of a system without necessarily having full knowledge of all the components of the system.

The great quantum physicists have parted from the classical physicists of the older generation precisely through their ability to go straight to the big picture of what they are studying, and also keep the big picture – conceptually and empirically – in focus all the way through their study, without getting stuck on trying to isolate the components. It is not the difficulties connected with measuring objects within quantum physics – which for example Heisenberg maintains with the epistemic uncertainty principle – that is the most important lesson. No, the really revolutionary lesson – for which Bohr finds inspiration in Whitehead and then formulates it as the ontic indeterminacy principle – is to understand that it is the relations, not the objects within the phenomena that give them their substance and that therefore must be regarded as primary in existence. This in turn has far-reaching consequences for all the emergences that are based on the underlying quantum physical reality. For example, French philosopher Bruno Latour formulates a pioneering actor-network theory for the social sciences in the 1980s – which among other things presupposes a radical equality between what were previously superior humans and subordinate technological complexes in their surroundings – based on the insight that everything constantly acts performatively in relation to everything else in existence, that is, everything is fundamentally interconnected and influences everything else, everywhere and always. This is quite simply what the quantum physical world looks like, and thus, argues Latour, the higher levels in the hierarchy – first classical physics and then the social arena – must also be subordinate to this conception of reality.

The historical problem of philosophy is that it has focused strongly on direct connections between phenomena, and thereby has been forced into extreme theoretical constructs about either direct connections or no connections at all, when the overwhelming majority of all connections in actual fact are indirect. It is through this ubiquitous indirectness that everything is interconnected with everything else. It can be difficult to apprehend quantum physical phenomena in the macro-domains that we usually associate with classical physics, but the phenomena repeat themselves there nonetheless, if you only observe them attentively enough. All physics is thus in the final analysis essentially quantum physics, which means that even metaphysics must be concordant with quantum physics. If this constant complementarity is not taken into account, we can say goodbye to both intellectual respectability and the contact with physical reality for good. If, on the other hand, complementarity is factored into the calculation, an objectively speaking far more correct world view opens up, more so than anything humanity has ever experienced before. This doesn’t exactly lend itself to reducing credibility.

Based solely on its enormous usage in thousands and thousands of experiments, quantum mechanics is the most stable and reliable theoretical construct that has ever been tested and used in the history of the sciences. And the relationalist physics that follows in its wake emphatically invalidates Platonian and Newtonian determinism. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce predicts the coming kiss of death to determinism already a few decades before quantum physics becomes widely accepted when he launches the principle of tychism (from the Greek tyché = chance) in the 1890s. Peirce maintains that spontaneity is an inescapable fact of the Universe. After quantum physics becomes widely accepted, philosopher of science Karl Popper points out that Peirce paves the way philosophically for quantum physics’ indeterminism with his pragmatism. The militant indeterminist Daniel Dennett develops Peirce’s tychism in his book Freedom Evolves. Dennett, also inspired by Leibniz and Hume, argues that while the future is open and the world is indeterminist, everything can still have one necessary cause, since a necessary cause is not tied to just one possible effect. According to Dennett, the fact that all events have a cause is not per se a valid argument for determinism.

In Karen Barad’s radically universocentric onto-epistemology, we abandon the dividual identity and shift our focus to the Universe itself. Inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy and in particular with support from Bohr’s quantum physics, Barad completely pulverises transcendental correlationism which had dominated Western thinking since Kant. By pitting Bohr’s ontic principle of determinism against Heisenberg’s epistemic uncertainty principle, Barad opens the way for agential realism, a relationalist philosophy driven by a radical pathos for a completely new kind of potential objectivity. As for Bohr before her, the renowned waves and particles of quantum physics are only abstractions for Barad. The most important thing is not that the waves and particles are contradictory but that they are complementary. This is what is called Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle. Phenomenologically we express this by saying that the wave is a mobilist phenomenon, while the particle is an eternalist phenomenon.

Barad argues that, thanks to the principle of complementarity, Bohr succeeds in eliminating the Cartesian subject once and for all. There is never any detached subject that does not at the same time participate in the indeterministic process with openness to the future. There is, according to Bohr, no neutral observer outside the phenomenal processes. And if the observer is always located within the phenomenon, this means that this observer must be regarded as objectively accessible, although not in the classical objectivist sense. Rather, agential realism is concerned with a new kind of objectivity liberated from classical subjectivity, since the theory disqualifies all notions of an external subject as a spectator and neutral measurer of the phenomenon. All equipment for measuring the phenomenon is thus part of the phenomenon itself. The apparatus is itself an agent that intra-actively produces fictives within the phenomena’s floating boundaries. This means that we can forget the old phenomenological pair of antonyms, subject and object. The new objective reality is made possible because objectivity refers to possible agential separabilities and not to an impossible, absolute exteriority. This is why Barad uses the term agential realism.

Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.

The shift from the human to the universal centre is the necessary and correct manoeuvre. In the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos, Barad finds the new divinity that replaces the human being that had been declared dead by her predecessor Foucault, namely the universal subject as a kind of Bohrian supraphenomenon. It is important to point out that the purpose of Barad’s anti-anthropocentrism is not to eliminate the human being from all equations. Instead, it is concerned with giving the human being as agent her onto-epistemologically correct place in the greater phenomena that existence is comprised of, and this occurs only when the Universe is held up as primary and the human subject is reduced to something secondary. The Universe is not some transcendental category in Man’s orientation through existence, which Kant imagines in his autistic phenomenology. The Universe is instead real and expresses itself in and through the many billions of human subjects that it produces among other things, rather than the other way around. The Universe lives, thinks, speaks, creates, feels pleasure and multiplies through us. Nor is this all: through us the Universe dies and leaves room for constantly new phenomena. All this taken together is supreme motivation for naming Barad’s book Meeting The Universe Halfway a syntheist manifesto.

Baradian phenomenology is based on a constantly ongoing intra-activity within phenomena rather than an inter-activity between various distinct subjects and objects. Every individual phenomenon is both a fundamental building block in existence and concurrently intra-acting, filled with internal activity in all directions. Barad wants to kill off Kantian representationalism and its fixation with the patriarchal reflection. Representationalism is an obvious by-product of Cartesianism. Representations have constantly been prioritised at the expense of what they are presupposed to represent. By instead building first from Foucault’s and later also Latour’s and Butler’s post-structuralist ideas of performativism, we open the way for a philosophy that shifts its focus to direct engagement in material reality. All phenomena are constantly affected by the performativity of their environment. Large quantitative differences in performativity create phenomena with radically different properties.

But it is not just Foucault and his successors that inspire Barad. From another of her predecessors, Donna Haraway, she borrows the idea that the diffraction of wave motions is a better metaphor for thinking than reflection. Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics are all influenced radically and fundamentally by the new universocentric perspective. They all interact in the new onto-epistemology around agential realism. Quantum physics radically breaks away space–time from Newtonian determinism. With this shift it is also necessary to abandon the idea of geometry giving us an authentic picture of reality. It is with the aid of topology rather than through geometry that we can do syntheist metaphysics justice, Barad argues. Neither time nor space exist a priori as transcendental, determined givens, before or outside any phenomena, which is of course what Kant imagines. Time is not a thread of patiently lined-up and evenly dispersed intervals, and space is not an empty container in which matter can be gathered. The role of the engine of metaphysics is shouldered by non-linear network dynamics, which drives the equally non-linear event, rather than the old linear history, which is supposed to drive the equally linear progress. Entheist duration is thus also a dynamic, not a linear, phenomenon.

According to Barad, the phenomena arise as intra-acting and agential entanglements. Instrumental measurements expand rather than see through collapsing entanglements. This means that quantum mechanics is really about non-separability, not non-locality. Quantum physical non-locality is not necessarily the same thing as physical non-locality. Agential separability is quite simply an exteriority within and not outside the phenomena. Phenomena are the basic units of both ontology and epistemology, but at the same time intra-acting and above all fundamentally plural. They are irreducible multiplicities which thus do not allow themselves to be reduced to isolated units. Not because this inspires some charming philosophy to contemplate in splendid isolation, but because physics actually functions precisely in this way. Here Barad resembles other philosophers with a strong involvement in the new physics, such as Ian Hacking and Joseph Rouse. Bohr’s realism and objectivism constitute a solid ground on which to build further, since it is solely about factual, material embodiments of theoretical concepts. It is the Universe that speaks through us rather than the other way around in Bohr’s life’s work as a physicist and philosopher. Niels Bohr is the syntheist agent par excellence. And Karen Barad is his prophet.

Cause and effect arise through intra-activity within the phenomena. According to Bohr, cause and effect are not deterministic, nor do they perform in any absolute freedom. Cause and effect operate with varying degrees of probability in openness to the future. Exclusions in every intra-acting movement close the possibility of all forms of determinism and keep the future open. Agential realism is thus radically indeterministic, but does not on that account permit any free will in the classical sense. Free will namely presumes that everything desirable is possible, but this is of course never the case since every individual process comprises an infinite number of exclusions and takes place in a situation which is defined precisely by its limitations. Thus all the fancy talk about free will is pointless. All the more since no Cartesian cogito exists that might be able to exercise this free will, if it were to exist in spite of everything. However, free choice is a credible and extremely interesting concept for syntheist ethics; however free choice is an entirely different concept to free will.

Barad’s agential realism may to good effect be pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s psychoanalytic version of the transcendental subject; syntheologically it would correspond to Barad’s Pantheos being pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s Atheos. It is historically necessary for Barad to act as a radical mobilist in order to once and for all divest herself of Kantian representationalism and think her way fully through the consequences of the quantum physics revolution. Rather, she therefore operates as a personified oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos. No thinker succeeded in taking mobilism to its furthest extremity before Barad – not even radical mobilists such as Whitehead and Deleuze – in order thereby to create the necessary opposite to eternalist thinking which together enable the syntheological consummation. Thus, Barad thus does not operate in any kind of opposition to Atheos’ two prophets Lacan and Zizek. Rather, she fills the tragically large intellectual void that is the necessary antithesis to their own highly intellectualised void within the syntheological pyramid.

Deleuze’s metaphysics otherwise constitutes an excellent transition between Baradian relationalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Deleuze places the difference before the identity: according to him identity is generated out of the difference, rather than the other way around. Deleuze thereby precedes Barad’s relationalism. At the same time, Deleuze devotes considerable amounts of work to constructing a new concept of the subject in the wake of the Lacanian revolution within psychoanalysis. He seeks a kind of downright ecstatic but still immanent state which he calls transcendent rather than transcendental. This leads him to the invention of the dividual, the schizoid subject, which has since become the human ideal of the attentionalist netocracy in the Internet age (quite irrespective of whether it was Deleuze’s intention or not in the 1970s to create such a future instrument of power).

The Lacanian Zizek often finds himself in dialogue with Deleuze in his books, for example in Organs Without Bodies (where Zizek also pursues an extensive dialogue with – in his opinion – the Deleuzian philosophers Bard and Söderqvist). A perfect example of a Deleuzian hybrid concept is the dark predecessor, which plays a central part in the construction of Deleuze’s dividual subject. The dark predecessor is most simply described as ontology’s own Higgs field. The real is that which prevents the world view from ever becoming coherent or complete. It is because we never can grasp objectivity that subjectivity arises. The subject is born in the same moment as we are confronted with disturbances and questions in relation to our world view and it is these recurring disturbances that keep the subject alive.

Deleuze prophetically sees how the onrushing Internet age – which he consistently refers to as capitalism with schizophrenia in his key works Anti-Oedipus and Mille plateaux, authored with Felix Guattari – rules out the classical majoritarian claims to power. Baradian relationalism goes a couple of steps further in the same direction. There are no secure majoritarian identities left when we start to apprehend the extent of the quantum physics revolution. All remaining identities, except the Universe itself, are quite simply minoritarian with Barad. In order to produce an identity other than that of the Universe, there needs to be a clear minoritarian difference, which is why only the strongest minoritarian identity can generate what Lacan’s and Zizek’s predecessor Hegel calls the universal singularity.

The unifying narrative can only be told by the subservient agent with which all other agents can identify. When the Deleuzian dividual is placed before the enormity of Pantheos, capitulation is the only logical response. But it is then not a question of just any old capitulation. Because it is about a kind of Spinozist capitulation, which in turn enables a dialectical continuation in the shadow of Pantheos through the establishment of Syntheos in conjunction with the other particularities of the universal subject. Therefore Zizek and Deleuze are united in their passionate search for the Internet age’s revolutionary utopia, where it is Deleuze in his capacity as the voice of Entheos – in relation to Zizek as the voice of Atheos’ and Barad as the voice of Pantheos – who is closest to the realisation of Syntheos within the syntheological pyramid.

For in the same way that the axis between Atheos and Pantheos vibrates in the syntheological pyramid, the axis between Entheos and Syntheos vibrates. Entheos represents immanent becoming and difference; Syntheos represents utopian being and identity. As Deleuze points out: Entheos always precedes Syntheos. First Entheos generates the Deleuzian dividual; thereafter Syntheos generates the revolutionary utopia. What is important is that syntheology places transcendence in becoming and not in being. There is no transcendental being within syntheism, which is a radical point of departure from all dualist religions. Transcendental becoming is instead consolidated in a radically monist and relationalist universe. Becoming is primary, but wills itself into being and does this time after time through perception’s creative eternalisations. This will from becoming to being is the movement from Entheos to Syntheos.

The Universe obviously needs no preceding divinity in order to exist. There is no need for any religion whatsoever when existence is in a state of constant expansion. However, the moment we move from becoming to being, the theological perspective becomes necessary. The dialectic between eternalism and mobilism requires a syntheological accompaniment. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos in itself gives rise to the metaphysical impulse. We express this by maintaining that being requires God. We see this movement with Hegel when he transports himself from Atheos to Pantheos and sees the World Spirit (Welt Geist) being born out of this movement. But the same thing also occurs with Deleuze when he moves from Entheos towards Syntheos and sees the plane of immanence being born out of this movement. The eternalisation of the mobilist chaos is in itself the original sacralisation of existence, the birth of metaphysics. Through the process of eternalisation, chaotic existence is transformed into a single coherent substance, what the mobilist philosophers call the One. And the One is of course the name of immanence philosophy and process theology for God.

But inside the syntheological pyramid, there is also movement from Syntheos in the direction of Atheos. Therefore it is interesting to introduce and study a rigidly atheistic nihilist as an interlocutor to Deleuze’s and Barad’s relationalist metaphysics. The exceptionally learned and colourful Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound champions the thesis that Nietzsche and Deleuze guilty of a kind of wishful thinking mistake when they place existential ecstasy before existential anxiety. Like the Buddha, Brassier instead sees anxiety as primary for existence – pain always surpasses pleasure – and he constructs a kind of Freudian cosmology out of the conviction that the empty, blindly repetitious drive is the engine of existence. The focus of Brassier’s negative theology lies in the Universe’s future self-obliteration, which according to him must govern all values and valuations until then. Here he takes his starting point in the human being’s will to nothingness which emerges from the increasingly leaky subconscious and constantly makes itself felt as a theme among the rapidly growing subcultures of the Internet age.

From a relationalist perspective, Brassier however makes three mistakes in his reasoning. First of all, there is nothing that says that ethics must be governed by, or in any way be connected with, how nature works. If that were the case, in principle one would never have needed to question 19th century social Darwinism, and the concept of civilisation would be uninteresting in this context. Brassier’s ethics really don’t deviate on any important point from social Darwinism’s bizarre quest to reduce the human being to a creature whose only task it is to put Darwinian evolution on the right track, so to speak, as if history – paradoxically enough thus both deterministic and indeterministic at the same time – just like evolution for some obscure reason would need speeding up and to be guided towards its own, explicitly inevitable fulfilment. Brassier is here guilty of a kind of naturalist masochism, an existential resignation in the face of the human being’s possibilities of finding her own identity-creating ethics that is independent of her environment’s presumed historical direction. Therefore, his ethics comes down to an ambition to given in to and copy what nature is presupposed to tell us through its blind fickleness, and an edict to perceive these ruthless and highly arbitrary culling processes as commendable.

Against the idea of the human being as a malleable creature subject to a fate which is paradoxically both unavoidable and his duty to create, syntheism puts forth the ideals of Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze: the human being as an affirmative activist battling against all that which she apprehends as nature’s – or for that matter even culture’s – systematic arbitrariness in the form of imposed rules of play. Rather, according to syntheist ethics it is precisely in the protest against the‘ given conditions of existence and in the human being’s civilizational redirections of history that she makes his imprint as an ethical creature. It is Man’s concrete actions in the battle against nature’s givens which subsequently generates ethical substance, which thus has nothing to do with any personal suitability for subservience. The same obviously applies for every thought of an indeterministic world where the task of ethics would be to call on the human being, against his better judgement, to behave as though he were deterministic after all; a position that can be exemplified by the vulgar and stupid imperative “Follow your nature!”. If existence indeed were deterministic, which it certainly isn’t, this call would be completely superfluous, since there are no alternatives. Nor any ethical problems to contemplate either.

Secondly, Brassier confuses quantity with quality. Even if quantitatively speaking pain were more prevalent than pleasure in existence – which definitely can be questioned: pain and pleasure are, to start with, often each other’s complements in various multidimensional experiences rather than each other’s opposites – it does not mean that the pain is qualitatively more important and thereby more identity-generating than pleasure. Here syntheism contributes something that Brassier overlooks in his philosophy, namely the spiritual experience. What characterises the spiritual experience is above all its production of infinity in the present, which means that it transcends the quantitative, places quality before quantity, and thereby enables the existential and thereby ethical prioritisation of life and pleasure over death and pain. The infinite now defeats drawn-out and maybe even life-long suffering, not just in the moment when it is experienced concretely, but even more as the identity-producing memory which generates ethical substance; something that arises only afterwards in the processing and integration of the event into the life fantasy, where it lives on as a constantly identity-generating abstraction.

A few really profound spiritual experiences may suffice, or even just one, in order to motivate a syntheist believer to endure and soldier on in a life replete with toil and set-backs. The syntheist philosopher Robert Corrington sets up this qualitative spiritual ideal as intense ecstasy against its opposite, drawn-out melancholy, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy. Here the memory function of consciousness plays a central role. We need not return to life’s greatest intensities all the time in order to recall them, but thanks to memory we can return to, and in this way reuse, life’s greatest and most valuable intensities as creators of existential meaning. And it is of course precisely in the form of memories, and not as direct experiences, that emotional intensities give life its meaning. As experiences per se the most powerful intensities are almost unbearable in their extension; constantly being in an ecstatic climax must be regarded as a form of psychotic madness rather than perfect pleasure of life.

It is instead the memory of ecstasy that frames existence, and it is this framing in itself that generates experiences of meaning, value, identity and ethical substance. Here, syntheist ethics breaks not only with Brassier’s neuronal quantity fixation, but also with utilitarianism’s autistic overconfidence in statistical utility functions on the whole; the most important things in life might not always be free, but they are definitely not measurable, nor are they thereby objectively comparable between people. That which cannot be measured cannot be treated as something measurable with one’s intellectual credibility still intact. Even less so can an entire ethical system be based on such impossible and childish quantitative comparing. In the same way that utilitarianism must fail to grasp the central role of the transcending experience in the syntheist agent’s lifeworld – utilitarians are evidently themselves both emotionally and spiritually handicapped – syntheism is definitely not some kind of utilitarianism.

Thirdly, Brassier follows in the post-structuralist Jean-Francois Lyotard’s footsteps and is obsessed with the future death of the stars as a horizon for ethics. But this is based on a misunderstanding of what physics tells us. According to M-theory, universa are incessantly generated in a multiverse that has no limits whatsoever for its possible expansion. Regardless of whether our current universe eventually levels out into an endless and cold, black goo, or if its accelerating expansion is dramatically turned into a compressing contraction – or in any other way is suddenly transformed into a new round of accelerating expansion, as the physicist Roger Penrose suggests in his book Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe – there are no obstacles to the rise of new universa both within and outside our own universe. Physics supplies no such obstacles, and once we have got past the spatial and temporal limitations – which in our intuition we find it so infinitely hard to think ourselves past – the death of the stars disappears as a necessary or even conceivable horizon for ethics.

Brassier has a hard time concealing his contempt for Henri Bergson’s classical vitalism. And physics of course provides no support for life having any kind of peculiar nature or special position in the Universe. Life arises under specific material circumstances, which does not mean that this in itself is some sort of great mystery. What is fascinating is thus not life itself, as classical vitalism maintains, but the enormous complexity and constant generating of even more complexity of existence, as Deleuze assumes in his revised vitalism. Instead of, in the manner of Bergson, anthropocentrically preaching vitalism as a life-affirming religion – with the motto that the more life forms that arise, the better – from the perspective of process theology it is more correct to speak of the enormous and expanding complexity of physics per se. Vitalism can only survive if it is expanded into a universocentric, general doctrine of multiplicity. If we are to speak of a credible vitalism in the wake of the advent of M-theory, then this vitalism must already regard quantum fluctuations in the great void as a kind of life form. And why not?

Beyond value philosophy’s traditional pair of opposites vitalism (Bergson) and antivitalism (Brassier), syntheism instead is based on the concept of pure complexity. It is about a complexity which, like Deleuze’s other differences, precedes the production of identity. It is the pure complexity in network dynamics that gives the agents and phenomena their value, not the other way around. For life is, regarded as just life, really not much of a life to speak of. It is mostly lots of death. Life is always based on an act of self-sacrifice and must therefore be regarded as an isolating breaking off from life itself. As such life is doomed to obsessive repetition of its own act of death. Vitalism only hits the right note when it ceases to deify life as higher in standing than non-life, and instead views life as large-scale, duplicate non-life, as yet another in a long line of pure complexities. For what is life other than a cloned, discrete feedback loop that happens to be able to multiply itself?

We see clearly how the sacrificial act itself as a condition for life expresses itself as the collective sacrifice throughout history. Sacrifice was developed by nomadic society as a response to nature’s devastating power over mankind. The sacrifice was the tribe’s way of trying to buy independence and room to manoeuvre from the gods. However, all organisms invariably sacrifice part of themselves for the sake of their own survival. Only through such an act of sacrifice can the being attain independence from its environment. Independence per definition means of course a cloning of what is independent from precisely the bigger phenomenon from which it now stands independent. The great trauma is of course what remains after the self-sacrifice; it is the perceptional protection against an overabundance of stimuli; it is the foundation for the new self in what is independent. It is thanks to the trauma that the being becomes functional, manages to exploit its environment for its own survival, and thereby also assures itself of resources for its future reproduction.

Brassier calls this repetitive complexity machine an organon of extinction. However, the advent of syntheism means that the role of the victim in culture fades away. To begin with, syntheists try not to appease any gods in order to keep them at distance. On the contrary, syntheists create the new gods for a new era and above all for the future. And they seek contact with the gods, see their genesis as the realisations of humanity’s dreams and utopias. Thus, there is no need for sacrifice in syntheism, what is demanded is rather the direct opposite of sacrifice: the syntheist rituals about coalescence and entanglement; partly between people, partly between the human being and her environment. The worship of the network as an event naturally also relates to the realisation of the network as an event, that is, absorption into the holy intimacy as the happy ending to the tragic history of alienation.

Just like Nietzsche’s creative affirmation, the syntheist conviction is primarily an attitude. Syntheism starts with a will to act rather than with knowledge. It is based on the idea of life as something infinitely valuable. A life that uses itself through constant, creative reshaping and valuing of everything and everybody in the environment cannot even contemplate putting a value on itself. Thus, life in relation to life itself must be infinitely valuable. But the infinite value of life in relation to life itself does not automatically mean that this applies to other life forms as well. The collective debt is fed from the assumption that a life that cannot be saved in turn generates even more collective guilt, for example. This not only drives the collective fantasy – and thereby explains why history is constantly filled with myths of the great Fall of Man and the accompanying calls for salvation – but sooner or later pushes the collective identity towards its self-inflicted extinction.

The Nietzschean reaction to this collective fantasy of extinction is of course amor fati, that is, not just the acceptance of, but also the unconditional love of fate. Goodness and evil meet in the present where fate breaks them down and joins them in a neutral history substance that the Nietzschean übermensch loves because it is to be loved as being the only thing that exists in history. Only based on the unconditional acceptance of everything in world history up until now – where one’s own experience as a subject is included to the highest degree – can the syntheist agent create a radically different utopian future beyond the present. For what is the religious impulse and its search for the spiritual experience if not a reason where the human being concentrates herself on herself and her innermost emotional needs and lets intuition lead her past all of life’s excuses that claim that the impossible really is impossible? For this is of course not true: it is precisely when reason takes over from rationality that the impossible becomes possible and Syntheos arrives in the future. It is there and then that the human being can realise his wildest dreams and create God.

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