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Dividual
The opposite of an individual, an infinitely divisible human being or phenomenon, rather than an incorruptibly indivisible human being or object. See, by way of comparison, agent.
This incessantly and obsessively repetitive self-validation process is mostly an empty ritual and really only hides our narcissism behind a kind of collective Potemkin village of no real substance. We simply replace conscious narcissism with an every bit as unfounded, subconscious internarcissism. Simply put: two people who no longer have the energy to worship themselves, instead worship each other for each other through mutual, pathological back-scratching. This means that, subconsciously rather than consciously, we are still as frustrated as before. This situation engenders a constantly growing inability to see things clearly – “Why does everything just get and feel worse even though I’m doing everything right?” – which leads to a burdensome, stupefying alienation. And there we are. What the contemporary secularised person finds it hard to see for obvious reasons is that religion, according to its syntheological definition, is the effective and necessary remedy for this alienation. Only through religion can we undergo a dividuation and acquire a liberating dividual rather than an imprisoned individual identity. A human being is not a solid indivisible entity. A human being is many divisible entities collaborating with each other.
In only a few decades, the revolution in communication technology has connected billions of people and the innumerable machines around them with each other, globally and in real time. The world was digitised, globalised, virtualised and became interactive. The inadequacy and unfitness of the Cartesian individual as a basic concept in the new cyber world has resulted in the individual dying – summarily dismissed by neurophysiology and research into consciousness (see The Body Machines) – and being replaced by the network as the fundamental metaphysical idea. The human being is transformed from an individual chained to his or her narcissistic ego to an open and mobile dividual in an all-encompassing, gigantic network that is acting more and more like a single emergent phenomenon, like a single, global, coherent agent. We call this agent, with its historically speaking divine proportions and characteristics, the Internet.
The netocratic dividual uses the enormous offering of new chemicals to constantly change his/her many personalities. This occurs in part as a late-capitalist adaptation strategy vis-à-vis the demands and expectations of one’s environment, and in part also as a subversive netocratic and revolutionary tactic to overthrow capitalism’s limited status quo. When the chemicals set the classical, genetic constants of intelligence, gender and sexual orientation in motion, the foundation of the stale myth of the sober individual (see The Body Machines) is demolished, and is therefore forced into a final hyperphase as an increasing consumtarian underclass phenomenon (see The Netocrats). The consumtarian therefore strives right to the very end to constantly try to improve him/herself, to invoke an allegedly genuine and underlying I-essence, accompanied by tabloid culture’s demands for consumption-generating frustration with the self. Career choice, gym sessions, fashion diets, partner hunting: all these are flagrant examples of vulgar hyperindividualism. On the other hand, the netocrat has long stopped believing in the coherent individual, and instead cultivates hundreds of different personalities within his/her new ideal dividual (see The Body Machines), often invoked and expedited by carefully designed chemical cocktails.
With the advent of informationalism, a freedom arises to organise the rapidly-growing, expanding social networks in accordance with the long-neglected desires of our genes. The optimal size of a tribe of nomads or the newly-established, permanent settlement of around 150 adult members as a genetically determined ideal resurfaces constantly as the ideal size for these virtual networks. When this ideal can be reproduced without costly opposition over and over again from the advent of the network society and onwards, what musician Brian Eno calls technological primitivism arises, a kind of high-tech return to the primitivist tribe community. The virtual subcultures on the Internet replace the Church’s and nation’s identity-bearing functions from the previous paradigms (see The Netocrats). The Internet is a digital jungle filled with dividual-driven subcultures in vast quantities.
Syntheos is the personification of the world, which gives it its value. Through this value, the dividual and the interactive subcultures get their values. Without a value for the world, the dividual and the interactive subcultures cannot have any values either. Syntheism borrows its fundamental value from the fact that there is something rather than nothing, as Martin Heidegger expresses it, and that this something rather than nothing is the basis of life. Syntheism is based on maintaining and maximising the dynamics of existence. The place in time–space where dynamics is maximised is called the event, and this event is syntheism’s metaphysical engine. It takes place all the time and at all levels in the syntheist, indeterminist world view. Every moment in time and every point in space accommodates an enormous number of potential events. Indeterminism also means that no effect is reducible solely to the causes that engender it; the effect might very well be a uniquely situation-dependent excess in relation to its causes. We express this as the Universe generating a steady stream of emergences.
These well-considered choices of names are of course open to discussion in this ironic polytheism for no end of time; the four syntheological concepts were created in a participatory and intersubjective process in a syntheist online forum and, in good netocratic spirit, lack an original dividual author. The movement has thus agreed as a collective on these names together. But these supraphenomena are highly real and together with Friedrich von Schelling’s powerful foundation work and Martin Heidegger’s magnificent extension work constitute the groundwork within advanced metaphysics. And both extension and interior design work is still ongoing. American philosopher Robert Corrington, for example, in his book A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, constructs a system around what he calls the four infinities. Atheos corresponds to the sustaining infinite in Corrington’s metaphysics, Pantheos is another name for the actual infinite, Entheos corresponds to what Corrington calls the prospective infinite, and Syntheos is another name for the open infinite. The Irish philosopher William Desmond constructs a similar system in his book God and The Between around the three transcendences: Atheos is here the name of the interior potentiality (T1), Pantheos is the name of the exterior actuality (T2) and Entheos is the name of transcendence as transcendence per se (T3). The only reason that Desmond does not use a fourth component in his metaphysics is that he chooses to completely avoid the future as a theme; otherwise Syntheos would be obvious as Desmond’s T4.
The movement in the syntheological pyramid goes from the possible in Atheos to the realised in Pantheos; from the mutable in Entheos to the consummated in Syntheos. The syntheist calendar is constructed around syntheology’s four cornerstones and their quarters: Enthea starts at the spring equinox which is the syntheist new year, Panthea starts at midsummer, Synthea starts at the autumn equinox and Athea starts at midwinter. And then everything starts again from the beginning: repetition but with constant displacements. The movement within the syntheological pyramid also goes from the top down. When Syntheos is completed, Entheos gets a cohesive meaning: the chaotic differences and repetitions get a context since they suddenly appear as creative intensities on top of the stable community that Syntheos constructs. Entheos can be apprehended as the individual human being, the dividual subject, divided and fundamentally homeless. Syntheos is the collective subject, the holy community which is bigger for the dividual subject than the dividual subject is in relation to itself. We can express this in the following way: Syntheos is the emergent dimension where Entheos finds its home and is realised. Syntheos is the place where Entheos is transformed into the syntheist agent and meets its transience with dignity.
The human mind is the arena for a constant battle between the extremes Atheos (the absorbing subject) and Pantheos (the expanding cosmos), where Atheos represents the drive while Pantheos represents the desire within psychoanalysis. Atheos is the Universe as it apprehends itself, it is the subject’s experience of itself as a subject. In the same way that we must regard ourselves as voids where life seeks meaning through an always unsuccessful but nonetheless always repeated struggle to fill the void with content; in the same way Atheos is the idea of what the Universe sees when the Universe observes itself, from the inside. Pantheos is the Universe that we humans observe and to which we ascribe divinity; it is the Universe as object, observed by a subject (the believing dividual or the community). This means that syntheology emanates from a dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos, it is between these two concepts that we are moving – constantly, restlessly – they are our sacred extremes, midwinter and midsummer in the syntheist calendar, where Entheos is their common product, the fate that we unconditionally love: amor fati.
There are only processes in syntheism; everything is pure movement on top of pure movement, and only in the antagonism and oscillation between the extreme states of these fields do eternalisable phenomena arise. The world reflected by perception is the scene of the antagonism between Atheos and Pantheos. This antagonism between Atheos and Pantheos is the phenomenological engine; the oscillation between them is the arena in which the subject can arise as the self-image Atheos, which initially positions itself in relation to and then chooses to project the holy onto the Pantheos world view. This fundamental, religious truth as an act, the movement from atheism to pantheism, generates the dividual entheism, on which syntheists then choose to build the collective syntheism.
In the next step of the subjectivity process, the dividual, divided subject takes shapes as Entheos, and the collective, assembled subject takes shape as Syntheos. Here, it is Entheos that assumes the role of mobilism and Syntheos that takes eternalism’s role within the dialectics between mobilism and eternalism. It is, for example, the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos that vibrates through Deleuze’s classic work Différence et Répétition. Entheos stands for the differences and Syntheos stands for the generalities in Deleuzian metaphysics. The second oscillation in the syntheological pyramid arises between these two poles. The first oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos revolves around the One, which expresses itself as a single cohesive substance with an endless quantity of attributes. The second oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos however lacks the One as a cohesive point of departure, since the multiplicity in question which takes its starting point in Entheos is irreducible.
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.
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.
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.
Syntheist ethics is thus sociorelationalist and not cultural relativist, based on the original Zoroastrian understanding that intention, decision and interaction sooner or later coincide and together form the only possible ethical substance of both the individual human being and the collective civilisation. This means that the principle of explanatory closure not only kills Kant’s rationalist idea that Man is born with the natural ability to understand rather than simply subordinate himself to the world in its entirety; even Kant’s rationalist idea of Man being able to understand himself as a being within his own lifeworld is dead. The solid, closed and primary individual is replaced by the divided, open and secondary dividual as the human ideal. This means that the conceited idea that our thoughts and words belong to ourselves, that we can identify ourselves with what we think and say without connecting this to body, action and environment – as though what we are thinking and saying were originally created by and exclusive to ourselves – is dead. We will never have any sustainable identity as the inventors of these ideas, but on the other hand as their potential thoroughfares and interim receptacles.
This in turn means that we need a new, informationalist explanatory model for how words, thoughts and ideas arise and are formed, and above all for how they are interpreted and altered over time; how communication between bodies and media occur and above all what consequences this process has for our new, dividual identity. Precisely such a de-personified explanatory model has also emerged in parallel with digital technology, which is the foundation of the ongoing paradigm shift, and it is called memetics. We have already written extensively about this research field numerous times from many different angles (see The Futurica Trilogy). Memetic theory – which explains how words, thoughts, ideas and cultural components of various kinds multiply and are modified according to the same Darwinian selection principles that also regulate how genes multiply and are modified within biological systems – was launched in an essay by Ted Cloak in 1975 and popularised in exhaustive detail by Richard Dawkins in the book The Selfish Gene one year later. It was also Dawkins who coined the term meme for this replicator which is active within the sociocultural biotope and which is selfish in the same sense that the selfish gene is selfish, that is, its primary interest, if we allow ourselves to reason with the aid of an anthropomorphic image, is to multiply itself through dissemination to the greatest possible extent. It wants to infect the world.
An interesting aspect in this context is that memetics pays no heed to whether any particular meme proves to be true or false, useful or useless, from some arbitrarily chosen perspective. What is decisive is that the memes which are best suited to the prevailing conditions will survive and be disseminated. Meme X either fits with the patterns formed by the dominant memeplexes in an environment, which might just as well be a dividual brain as a collective community, or else it doesn’t – an environment that this meme then contributes to modifying by adding to the existing patterns, even if only the tiniest little bit. The decisive factor for a meme’s success is thus how it matches already existing memeplexes in the host body in question and whether it appears useful or in any other way appealing in the life situation in which this body finds itself. This means that the more effectively the meme offers infotainment to the intended host organism, the greater the chance that this host will spread the meme further by inspiring imitation in other potential hosts.
A meme survives and multiplies by making copies of itself, and thanks to its ability to blend in and appear useful or entertaining for a certain subject in a given situation at a certain point in time. Once again: it has nothing to do with what is true or false. This distinguishes the meme from the sign as a concept. Memetics quite simply constitutes a relationalist radicalisation of semiotics in the same way that Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy is a relationalist radicalisation of Peirce’s and William James’ relativist pragmatism. Through memetics – in particular through the introduction of emergent memeplexes – we shift towards a network-dynamics understanding of culture’s relationship to nature. The individual is no longer needed and has no function in this analysis. The dividual of network dynamics (see The Netocrats) takes over, and as a result of this paradigm shift, Man is taken from the centre of science to a peripheral seat in the grandstand, where he must be content with acting as the passive spectator and at the same time being seized as a storage and transportation vessel subservient to the extremely dynamic evolution of memes. All the work is done by the memes. The anthropocentric impulse and Man’s pride thus gets yet another flick on the nose, which in turn opens the way for universocentric interdependence, which is attendant on network dynamics.
With the advent of syntheism, we witness the death of the Cartesian theatre – and thereby also the individual. The wide acceptance of memetics gives us a superior alternative to faith in the atomised individual as the centre of existence. We are talking here of a syntheist agent which, in contrast to a Cartesian subject, never imagines that she is a little isolated figure, a sort of tenant who temporarily resides in the body; a passive observer behind the eyes who sometimes reluctantly, sometimes neutrally ontologically speaking, anticipates the surrounding world with which it then communicates via the lips and hands. An agent is instead an actor in various combinations and situations; partly an arbitrarily and temporarily delimited dividual, partly an arbitrarily delimited body, but also a body in collaboration with other bodies and phenomena in her environment. And it is as such an actor, mobile at all levels, in the midst of, and not in any mysterious way preceding the intra-acting – which in every moment is eternalised – that syntheist agentiality can arise as a self-experience.
From this insight concerning the logical terms and creative possibilities of the metalevel, we can formulate syntheism’s revolutionary ambition – its sabre thrust straight into the solar plexus of the old individualism – with the battle cry that is devastating for capitalism: Ideas want to be free, ideas cannot be owned! In fact, ideas do not belong to any of us; it is we who belong to them, and we cannot do anything other than obey them. Without owning one’s ideas, which never even belonged to the individual except in her own imagination – which was not either the individual’s own to command, in accordance with the free will that she has never owned either – the individual is completely castrated. And it is precisely in this manner that the netocratic dividual wants to regard the bourgeois individual. Therefore the question of who owns the ideas – not to mention the question of who, practically speaking, can own them – is the greatest, most important and controversial question of the current, burgeoning paradigm shift. Power’s memeplex has been set in motion and the world is trembling. Welcome to the informationalist class struggle!
The human being’s self-experience is of course as relationalist as everything else in existence. According to relationalist phenomenology, the human subject arises, if anything, as a kind of minoritarian by-product of a larger majoritarian phenomenon, where the majoritarian phenomenon that transcends the subject’s self-experience is its agent. It is thus not the case that separate souls sit and wait to be mounted inside shiny new bodies in some kind of creation factory – which Descartes’ and Kant’s dualism requires – but the self-experience is instead a highly efficient but nevertheless illusory by-product of the body’s many other doings – the borrowed component, taken out of empty nothingness, which means that the human equation suddenly seems to achieve an acceptable solution for itself. The self-experience is quite simply the logical end point where the subject process ties together for itself. Thus it does not come first, as Descartes and Kant presume, but rather last, so that the void that ties together all divided components within the dividual so that it can experience itself as a phantasmic unit and as a whole. All this thus takes place within the agent, the transient subject that cannot in any way precede or exist outside the basic agency. The body, the congregation and the society can all be agents, but without an agent that houses this subjectivity, it cannot exist at all.
The Zizekian abjective subject is fundamentally internally divided. The split within the subject precedes and is also the prerequisite for the ensuing distinction between the subject and the object. The subject is thus a reaction against its own cause; its modus operandi is to constantly rework the constant failure of being its own substance. The subject is quite simply the product of its own failures. Above all it is a product of the failure of the mystery. Only through insight into this state of affairs – let us say obtained through the syntheist schizoanalysis (see The Body Machines) – is the subject’s understanding of and functional relation to the real enabled. In the schizoanalytical process, the syntheist agent gets the chance to construct an infinite number of credible dividual identities within one and the same body. But that which ties all these identities together into one big circle – and makes them one single cohesive agential phenomenon for itself – this is the gaping void in the middle of the circle, Zizek’s abjective subject, Atheos.
When it comes to the historically necessary decentralisation of consciousness, syntheism differs radically from objective pantheism in all its variants, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and New Age. Searching for a cosmic consciousness outside Man, as these ideologies are doing, is nothing other than a childishly misdirected projection of anthropocentric, internarcissistic fantasies onto something that is particularly ill-suited for this. The truth is that the Universe, with its enormous creative potential, is far too fantastic to need a consciousness. Narrowly limited human beings on the other hand are – probably – the only consciousness in the Universe, since consciousness has arisen solely as a means of damage control, precisely because of Man’s existential limitations. Syntheism therefore only professes itself an adherent to subjective pantheism and not to the objective variant. We choose to project divinity onto existence as a whole – subjective pantheism is instead truth as an act par excellence – instead of believing that the cosmos imposes its divinity on us through a variety of dubious and self-appointed messengers. Syntheologically, we locate consciousness between Entheos (the dividual subject) and Syntheos (the collective subject), dancing on top of Atheos (the engine of the subject). But it is extremely important to keep it as far away as possible from Pantheos and all other superstitions regarding a cosmic consciousness.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze devoted a lot of work to the art of managing the chaos that occurs in the world before Man appears. He goes back to humanity’s nomadic roots and calls this deeper picture of the human being the dividual (the divisible human being), in contrast to the capitalist individual (the indivisible human being). Deleuze’s post-humanist dividual in turn happens to fit perfectly as an ideal for the rising netocracy under informationalism (see The Netocrats). Deleuze argues that the dividual is autoimmune. To be autoimmune is to see both good and bad sides in oneself as necessary. To be autoimmune is to acknowledge that one is finite and constantly divided in every moment, driven by internal desires and drives, which in the encounter with an incessant flow of external memes unite around the nomadic, dividual identity. To be autoimmune is to give full expression to our pathological sorrow and fear of death. The dividual is of course always conscious of the fact that the Universe has both the right and the capacity to crush her at any moment. Life is very fragile for real; this is not just some maudlin, sentimental phrase.
In contrast to the fixed individual, the nomadic dividual is just as playfully divisible inwardly as he is flexibly inconstant outwardly. In addition, the dividual is not the least bit interested in acting as some kind of centre of existence on individualism’s ramshackle, theatrical stage. In contrast to the Cartesian individual’s existential self-absorption – what else could we expect from a starting point that says “the only thing I am aware of is that I myself exist” – the dividual sees and understands herself as a kind of auto-suggested spectre of the mind, an emergent by-product from a specific evolutionary process, a highly peripheral creature in a monstrous Universe, who only gets a value for itself through creative interaction with other dividuals, who also themselves in the same way are always mutable. The dividual is not merely the historical and philosophical replacement of the individual, but also the consequence of the dismantling and decentralisation of the individual. Because it is not the dividual but the network that is syntheism’s metaphysical core.
This means that syntheism liberates Man from anthropocentrism and internarcissism. That the individual human being is freed from the responsibility of being an individual and instead is being encouraged to be a dividual is something that syntheism regards as a kind of existential salvation. Dividualism colours every fibre of the syntheist agent. Man is not the centre of existence any more than the ego could be the centre of Man (since it does not exist – see The Body Machines). Obviously, humanity and its attributes have no primary status in the Universe. Civilisations have arisen as an emergent phenomenon on a planet after aeons of history without any people at all. They have also perished without the Universe taking the slightest bit of notice. Humanity is a phenomenon that has sprung from other intra-acting phenomena. Nor is any human being created by other humans. Biological parents do not create their offspring – despite the fact that they would like to believe that this is the case – but are rather tools for the Universe’s constant production of new organisms furnished with bodies, language, ideas, consciousnesses and subconsciousnesses.
The oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos vibrates in the subconscious, and it is there that we find the starting point for Man’s self-image: the subject lives in and is construed from the subconscious. However, the subject lacks an essence of its own. It is the extimacy in the subjective experience that carries the subject. Quite simply it arises through extimacy, and not through intimacy. As compensation for the strenuous extimacy in relation to itself, the dividual seeks intimacy in the other. The driving force is that intimacy with the other should soothe the existential angst that arises from the necessary, inner extimacy.
Ethics is an intention founded in an identity in relation to the anticipated result of a cause and an effect. It is the anticipated effect of the action that gives it its ethical weight. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas thinks of ethics as an internal, intersubjective process without any requirements whatsoever on external, objective truths. Various conceivable intentions are weighed against various conceivable chains of cause and effect in a kind of civilised dialogue. Regardless of whether we apply ethics to a dividual or a collective, ethics is founded on an attitude. Nietzsche argues that this attitude is either active or reactive. The active attitude seeks an impression, an impact on existence, a confirmation of the agent’s interaction with its surroundings, in order to attain existential affirmation, a realisation of its own substance. Nietzsche calls this attitude the will to power. Against the will to power stands the reactive attitude, the will to submission, obliteration, a production of identity through identification with the victim rather than with the hero. This reactive attitude creates a bitterness towards existence, it produces and is driven by ressentiment, a perverted pleasure – rather than authentic pleasure – based on an escalating narcissistic self-loathing.
The syntheist agent stands out even more clearly with Hegel’s successor Martin Heidegger. He mistrusts Buddhism’s idea of enlightenment as a possible and desirable consciousness beyond the subject, and argues that the subject is located in and expands from its formative illusion. With Heidegger, the illusion is the subject’s engine – that is, identical with syntheology’s Atheos – and not a problem for the existential experience. It is instead the illusory quality that gives the subject its – for Heidegger decisive – presence. Heidegger here stands considerably closer to syntheism than Buddhism. The syntheist agent’s character traits present themselves most clearly in her relation to her own transience. This is the engine of culture: our mortality and the mystery of death. Death is characterised first and foremost by its anonymity; the subject is dissolved at death into a pre-dividual anonymous dimension. To die is to be dissolved into the Universe, to become part of that which is universal, which already within the subject is greater than the particular subject per se. That which dies in death is dividuation and nothing else. According to Gilles Deleuze, the death instinct should primarily be understood as a lack of imagination in relation to the existential experience. A lack of imagination which the syntheist culture is more than happy to remedy, and where the point of departure is given: Be your desire, be your drive, ignore everything else so that you may live life to the full!
However, the first relationalist attack on the individualist paradigm comes from environmentalism in the form of its aggressive demands that capitalism’s environmental destruction and ruthless plundering of resources must cease. Environmentalism is clearly based on a network dynamics theory without any focus whatsoever on isolated individuals or atoms. Here, the planet is regarded as a more or less closed system, which must be treated as just such a system, since all individual agents and nodes are completely subservient to the overarching network. Therefore environmentalism gives priority to the network over the individual; for the first time in these contexts Man is reduced from an individual to a dividual. And thereby clear ethical boundaries are set for what the human being can and cannot do in relation to the dynamic network’s interests. Environmentalism is a globalism, since a national environmental policy is in principle meaningless, and it must by necessity fight for the global solidarity which, in a network-dynamics theory, includes not just people but also plants, animals and natural diversity in itself. Quite logically, environmentalism begins to replace socialism as the seat of radicalism.
The dark underside explains why, on closer inspection, liberal democracy lacks incentives to defend the free and open Internet, and why if anything it is developing into netocracy’s most aggressive enemy. Because one of liberalism’s basic tenets is, in fact, that individual people – liberalism likes to call them individuals, and not without good reason – are so different from each other that every material form of mutual sympathy is precluded by definition. This is in spite of psychoanalysis teaching that the differences within the divided subject are greater than the differences between people. This has the consequence that if the mythology of liberalism is to be taken seriously, self-love is an impossibility. And without genuine self-love, there is no heroism either. Quite logically and consistently, syntheism’s monist and holistic dividual is therefore the radical opposite of liberalism’s dualist and divided individual.
Statism, faith in the nation state’s necessary supremacy and monopoly on violence, is capitalism’s political supra-ideology. Under statism’s banner, conservatism emerges as a protector of the establishment and its interests; liberalism constitutes a faith in the individual as a rational accumulator of resources in a market governed by a mystical hand which is invisible to the naked eye; while socialism is a blind faith in the political party as a substitute for God. Obviously, the advent of informationalism puts all these ideologies into deep crisis, since it attacks the very foundation for statism by undermining the drawing of borders in an increasingly irrelevant geography, which makes accessible alternative and infinitely much more tempting possibilities in terms of identity creation. In this process, not only is meliorism exposed as a banal myth, it also loses all its power of attraction; the netocratic dividual would much rather experience herself as a constantly ongoing and dynamic event throughout life than as a representative of any kind of slowly developed and predetermined progress. The old ideologies are quite simply plagued by statism’s deterministic view of history, which no longer has any credibility in an indeterministic universe. Therefore the ideological work must be done anew, and in that case all the way up from the theological foundation.
The American economist Hyman Minsky describes these processes with great accuracy. As the first relationalist economist, he turns to network dynamics in order to find an answer to how bubbles should be managed. Minsky’s answer is that speculation bubbles de facto cannot be or even should be avoided. His advice is rather that many small bubbles that burst often are better to have than just a few that burst seldom but then all the more dramatically and devastatingly. Naturally the dream of an economic equilibrium is yet another variant of the same old Platonist death worship that constantly recurs in the worlds of philosophy, physics and social science. However, the truth is that the economy is also a network-dynamical phenomenon that must be regarded not just as relativist, but relationalist. And it is at the transition from relativism to relationalism that the economy starts to include ecology and all the other factors that sooner or later will influence and interact with everything else of value within the economy. Relationalist economics does not preclude anything that influences dividual or social value creation, particularly factors such as clean air, clean water and the sustainable management of nature’s resources.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The emergence’s potentiality is based on a single simple principle: however many actualities might exist in physics, the potentialities that precede these actualities are always still far more numerous. It is sufficient to go to every human being’s genesis in order to establish that this is the case: for every dividual that is born, nature wastes millions and millions of sperm and also a large number of eggs, which are never made use of at all. And now we are just talking about the eggs and sperm that in spite of everything are actualised as precisely eggs and sperm – the virtual eggs and sperm are in turn many times more numerous. Out of this infinite multiplicity, the emergences stand out as the great winners, as the possibilities that an ultra-creative universe sooner or later must produce anyway, and they are impressive in their pre-adaptive ability to self-organise durable and stable complexities. It is not strange that people have allowed themselves to be carried away by nature’s ability to generate emergences throughout history.
When it comes to the syntheist agent, it is important to distinguish between the concepts dividual and subject. Informationalist Man is a dividual, but syntheism’s ambition is, based on dividuality, to develop an authentic subjectivity. In order to go from the usual reactive dividuality to unique, active subjectivity, the dividual must be isolated from the surrounding world’s constant distortions – be separated in order to be liberated from the lingering individualist ideology – which is enabled through purposeful spiritual work within the syntheist congregation’s walls. In this isolated, conscious, enlightened environment, the dividual can develop genuinely critical thinking, understand and experience herself as the syntheist agent. Through the identification with herself as an eternalised truth event, the authentic syntheist subject appears. Syntheists call this state clarification, and fidelity to the clarification is manifested through the syntheist baptism which is called the infinite now. In this state, the mind focuses on a single point in space–time where there is serenity, where all existential tensions are finally released, where the subject creates a tranquillity which makes it possible to quite simply be.
The historical escalation from eternity via progress to the event as the metaphysical engine of the paradigm has put increasing pressure on the individual human being. The informationalist dividual hears a multitude of voices within herself – what Freud imagines as a solid unit that he calls the superego – which constantly calls for more, different and stronger efforts. But the dividual is also notoriously afraid of being disconnected from the reward system that is connected to these efforts, in particular the wordless meeting with the other and the other’s gaze. What does the other want from her? What can she do to satisfy the other’s desire? Even if only to avoid being confronted with her own desire and dependence on the other that the realisation of her desire threatens to entail.
Civilisation is in fact terrified of the threat of disintegration. The domestication of materials, plants, animals and, last but not least, Man himself, starts with magic and its invocations. Culture is ultimately the domestication of nature. Correspondingly, the informationalist dividual wrestles with the dread of social isolation as the Internet age’s potential disintegration (if you are not located inside the networks, in practice, you cease to exist anymore). Modern Man experiences how questions and demands loom large to alarming levels. It is hardly strange that he lives under terrible stress. But then again, he is constantly busy with an incessant patching up of fracturing surfaces instead of doing something about deep spiritual needs, merely because modern Man has allowed himself to be convinced by the myth that says that such a credible course of action is impossible. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The syntheist community differs radically from the socialist idea of the collective that oppresses the dividual and forces her into submission. Here there is no talk of false consciousness. Rather, it is about the following: the less self-interest the dividual brings to the religious ceremony, the more powerful the spiritual experience. The spiritual work focuses on training the participants in a process that moves from the dissolution of the ego to a climb up the syntheological pyramid. Through this direct participation, the dividual becomes an active agent in and for the syntheist community, where the congregation is somewhat larger and more important than the separate dividual: the network of relations that gives the dividual context, meaning and existential weight in relation to herself. It is a matter of letting go of the ego fixation and allowing oneself to dissolve into the hierarchically higher collective emergence, where the community stands out as something greater than the sum of its constituent parts, as the most powerful agent. This is the infinite now, the immanent transcendence, the point where the connection to time and space disappears, where the dividual dissolves into something larger than herself, where Syntheos appears and completes the syntheological pyramid. The symbol for the infinite now is of course the lone photon, the light in eternity.
Thereby self-love, as truth as an act, is the obvious foundation for all syntheist rituals and ceremonies. It is the eternally recurring starting point for all spiritual work, whose ultimate purpose is to give the members of the congregation a strong and stable personal integrity without narcissistic elements. Since the self is in constant flux, and since all other emotions are dependent on the act of self-love, the act of self-love must be repeated time after time after time in the syntheist agent’s life. This repetition – this cycle of difference and repetition, as Gilles Deleuze would express the matter – constitutes the Nietzschean core in the syntheistic spiritual life. A look at one’s naked body in the mirror, followed by the decision to unconditionally accept this body as the current expression of Pantheos, as the Universe’s construction for housing the subject and its consciousness and passions, as an object to love merely by virtue of an existential decision, a personal primordial event. “This is what I am, this is the body that houses my many dividual identities and I love this body in order to be able to love myself, in order to thereby be able to love anything at all. Because I identify myself with the will to love.” Truth as an act cannot be expressed any more clearly.
Through this transparentisation, agentiality in the phenomenon in question migrates from the separate dividuals to the community itself. This is what we call the manifestation of Syntheos. The ethics of interactivity are intimately connected with the identity of the subject. Therefore the syntheist agent – both as dividual and community – is very much an ethical being. And with conscious ethics as a generator of identity, the subject in turn becomes a formidable syntheist agent. Here we reconnect with Zoroaster’s amoral but highly ethical ideal: “You are your thoughts, your thoughts govern your words; you are your words, your words govern your actions; you are your actions, your thoughts, words, and actions together constitute your ethical substance, they are and shall be your identity.” At the same moment that the believer identifies fully with her thoughts, words and actions, Zoroaster’s concept asha goes from being a phenomenological description of existence to becoming an ethical ideal. It is in this merging of phenomenology and ethics that the subject and asha become one with each other.
This would mean that if syntheism were to be linked to the Renaissance and Romanticism, melancholy is also the key to syntheist art. Which of course also applies in the reverse direction: for art, syntheism is the only possible way away from individualistic isolationism towards the holism of network dynamics. But it also requires an artist who builds her work on participatory pleasure instead of narcissistic enjoyment. The artistic auteur is thus yet another Napoleonic ideal that must die in the informationalist society. The reason is that syntheist art is created by an artistic dividual who believes in the community’s utopian possibilities, rather than by an artistic individual who revels in a ressentiment vis-à-vis her own time. And this must also occur without the art ever being allowed to fall into the trap of rationalist banality and lose its magic. Art must be constantly founded on and return to Atheos.
Syntheist art is not merely participatory and dividual rather than isolationist and individual; it is also a metaphysical art in the deepest sense of the term. With the advent of syntheism, art can leave cynical and cultural relativist inquiry which has been its axiomatic norm under late capitalism – from a Nietzschean perspective, what can be called a voluptuous revelling in the death of God – and instead devote itself to a transcending and utopian creativity. But this requires a distinct break with the late capitalist art world’s eschatological mythology – history has not reached any ending in the sense that Francis Fukuyama speaks of – and its fixated, academic power structure. This in turn requires the artist’s will to smash the individualist myth of the auteur as art’s Napoleonic patriarchal genius. Syntheist art is in fact liberated from the creator of the art and his atomism – it formulates the idea and then insists that the idea must be free. It knows that it is a small but fundamentally manifold part of a greater holistic phenomenon – it does not act as the distanced rebel for the purpose of self-glorification, but serves an even greater utopian ideal – and it is art’s relationship to this phenomenon, within which it acts as a cohesive agent, which is of interest.
According to David Hume, habit is a necessity for the dividual identity. We call the religious habit ritual. Syntheist rituals are often or regularly repeated habits with the purpose of strengthening the particular identity of the dividual and social identity within the community. Since syntheism unites around interactivity as an ideal, syntheists first and foremost conduct participatory rituals. Participatoryism is a principle which entails the participants meeting in radical equality without any hierarchies whatsoever between them; a meeting where each and every one is assumed to take full responsibility for herself and his own well-being as well as to actively participate and co-create rather than passively receive and consume. This means that syntheism is a radical egalitarianism. From an intersubjective viewpoint, all people have as much (or as little) value, and there is continuous work within the community to maintain this radical ideal. This means that syntheist leadership serves the community from below rather than manipulating it from above. It is driven by a will to lead the community through the mobilist chaos of existence to a more profound eternalist understanding of the conditions and opportunities of existence, from which the ethics of interactivity can be applied through truths as acts which are determined and then carried out.
The syntheist liturgy at the dawn of the Internet age is very much about desecularisation, a historically necessary ambition to sacralise late capitalist Man’s radically secularised lifeworld. For this reason, the syntheist liturgy has developed a nucleus consisting of two dividual components – a kind of spiritual lecture that is called a homily, and an often deeply personal testimony; as well as four collective components – a collective sound-making in order to manifest the affinity of the physical bodies present, a quiet phase of contemplation and meditation, a listening to carefully selected music which often is related to the theme of the current homily, and finally a closing peace salutation where all those agents in the community who are present wish each other well. A less liturgical gathering is called an act of worship, and a large liturgical gathering is called a mass. The liturgy is led by a master of ceremonies, who is complemented by a lecturer and one or more personal witnesses, where the homily has a collectively consolidating and universally valid subject while the testimonies are particular in nature. The syntheist liturgy is of course not bound to a physical space: it can just as well be carried out as a virtual ceremony.
In this, the syntheist family plays a central role. The Latin word familia can be found in every Indo-European language. This reveals that the concept of family has an extremely strong significance for human well-being, even if its detailed content has been altered throughout history. The family consists of those people who are closest to us, regardless of whether these are our biological relatives or not. This means that a living religion can hardly exist without a clear idea of the family, nor a sustainable idea of the family without a supporting metaphysics. In true relationalist spirit, the syntheist community’s members are called agents. An agent can be anything from a dividual member in a human body to a complete congregation consisting of many separate dividuals. On the other hand, the self-appointed victim and his concomitant victim mentality has no place within syntheism, since the victim seeks isolation from and independence vis-à-vis all external forces and therefore constantly looks for scapegoats and excuses when confronted with immanent reality, that is, the exact opposite of syntheism’s human-created gods and its quest for the sacred connection. The syntheist metaphysics around the family and the family’s agents is of course based on Syntheos, the divine manifested as the community between people.
The attentionalist dividual uses the enormous offering of new chemicals to constantly modify and develop her creative multiplicity of personalities. Obviously, this may be an adaptive strategy vis-à-vis the demands and expectations of his surrounding world, but it can also be about subversive, revolutionary tactics in order to overthrow capitalism’s restrictive status quo. When the chemicals set the classic constants of intelligence, gender and sexual orientation in motion, the foundation of obsolete individualism is eroded, and transitions into a concluding hyperphase as an escalating consumtarian underclass phenomenon. Therefore it is the consumtarian who, right to the bitter end, forces herself to constantly improve and refine herself and her own identity, to invoke a hotly desired underlying ego-essence, accompanied by tabloid culture’s demands for consumption-generating self-frustration. The netocrat, on the other hand, has long stopped believing in a cohesive individual and instead cultivates innumerable different personalities, not uncommonly invoked by and developed with the aid of carefully designed chemical cocktails.
Since syntheism is the religion of the Internet age, syntheist temples and monasteries are both physical and virtual. In its capacity as a potential manifestation of Syntheos, the Internet is an excellent environment for spiritual work. When the temporary experiments are transformed into permanent autonomous zones, they will emerge as finished temples and monasteries. In relation to the alienated, chaotic surrounding world, these oases of authentic living and sustainability will shine with the power of attraction. But they will also demand from new members an honest distancing of themselves from capitalism’s short-term and tempting superficial rewards; a distancing from bourgeois individualism and its fixation on exploitation in favour of netocratic dividualism and its quest for imploitation. This spiritual work must be carried out without the slightest instrumentality in human relations, without the least ulterior motive of any dividual gain for any single syntheist agent. Unlike the individual, the dividual is not the centre of existence, but subordinated to the network as the fundamental metaphysical idea. Dedication to the syntheist congregation is the bond to theological anarchism’s practical execution, without beating about the bush or any caveats. This dedication is confirmed before the community as a truth as an act, for example, in the syntheist act of baptism: the infinite now.
Here we see three clear movements: constructivism generates liberal democracy, transcendentalism generates totalitarian dictatorships and genericism generates theological anarchism. Constructivism uses people’s differences as axiomatic and assumes that these differences create the necessary hierarchies. It regards universality as an illusion that appears in the form of an illusory antagonism every time it is time to hold democratic elections. Transcendentalism takes the hierarchisation one step further and launches and develops this axiom which says that when the authoritarian leader personifies the universality, when the leader and the party in some mysterious way become one and the party and the people become one, society is transcendentalised and history is realised. Genericism, however, sees history as an eternal repetition of the same with extremely minor variations for every loop, where people’s similarity moves down to the dividual level: already from the start, all people are to be regarded as an expression of one and the same substance – the universality is already there.
From a theological perspective, the syntheist fall occurs when self-love turns into narcissism. Therefore it is necessary for syntheism to steadfastly fight internarcissism. Narcissism is just as present in the self-appointed victim as in the person in power. The syntheist hero instead surrenders herself, unreservedly and anonymously, in a brotherly/sisterly communion with the syntheist community. Beyond this communion, ethics is born in the making of agency: as an agent, within and together with the syntheist congregation, the dividual seeks a strong ethical identity, an existential substance, which is realised when a promise becomes action. According to the amoral but incorruptibly ethical Zoroaster, ethics is a perpetually recurring feedback loop: You are what you think, what you think affects what you say; you are what you say, what you say affects what you do; you are what you do, what you do affects how you think, and so on. Only through identifying himself as a syntheist agent can the dividual enter into and complete the Zoroastrian ethical circle as an intra-acting phenomenon within the syntheist community.
That things and actions have a value for Man from the point of view of his possibilities of survival is not particularly surprising. But what makes Man’s valuation special is that he also bestows value on things and actions that he has no evident use for whatsoever. Man experiences instead an emotional connection, a feeling of expanded identity, in relation to what he values. Thus there is every bit as much existential as utilitarian subjective valuation. Fetishistic valuation has its foundation in the subconscious conviction that if nothing is valued, one’s own existence is worthless: therefore something must always be valued, and this valuation is consequently hysterical rather than logical, dividual rather than universal. What has been valued on purely fetishistic grounds often gets enormous value, since the process is linked to the narcissistic impulse – if this thing or this action gets a value, then I get a value as well through my intimate relationship with the fetish, and thereby life and existence get a value. Everything valuable hangs together and, through this very entanglement, creates a value. The world is thus saved by the fetish and Man can heave a sigh of relief.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58