Back to index
Individualism
The religious conviction that Man rather than God is the centre of existence, its objective and meaning and that everything in existence consists of fundamental solid entities, individuals, of which everything else consists and to which everything else returns, without anything thereby being fundamentally changed. This anthropocentric ideology was originally formulated by the French philosopher René Descartes and later consummated by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The concept is synonymous with humanism within the social sciences and atomism within the natural sciences.
With the Cartesian revolution in the 17th century, the metaphysics of individualism arrived on the scene, with Man gradually replacing God as the theological foundation, even if this revolutionary change was kept hidden as far as possible in order to avoid outbursts of ecclesiastical rage. God is thus not dead to start with; God has only gone to bed and fallen asleep. But ultimately, what role does His potential presence play when His creation is perfect anyway? The main thing for the individualists is that God has become superfluous, which enables the individual to slowly but surely take His place. It soon became evident that humanism fitted perfectly as the religion for the new capitalist and industrialist paradigm, and society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century, when the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on. Syntheism is the metaphysics of the Internet age. A shift is necessary because the philosophy of every paradigm must have its own blind but nonetheless relevant faith as a basic axiom. The masters of informationalism – the netocrats – quite simply perceive the network as the most striking metaphor for the necessary metaphysical foundation of the paradigm.
Because of this dramatic efficacy, metaphysical storytelling is not random, but of the highest priority for those in power. It can only be consigned to the person who is best suited to be the truth producer of the prevailing paradigm and who thereby also has the strongest incentive to preserve the status quo. Responsibility for metaphysics falls to either an already powerful institution in the society, such as the Church in relation to the monarchy and the aristocracy under feudalism. Otherwise a new institutional elite is constructed to formulate the new, emerging paradigm’s conception of the world – naturally at the expense of the old paradigm – such as when the universities expanded and acquired enormous power under capitalism, because the university formulated the individualism and the atomism that the bourgeoisie used in order to sweep away the Churches’ monotheist explanatory models and to take power from the aristocracy. Without popes we would never have seen any kings, and without university professors the world would never have beheld any industrialists either. The cardinals dined on pheasant with the nobility, and the academics eat steak with the entrepreneurs for good reason. They divide up and balance the power in the prevailing paradigm between themselves.
The disappointment is not even about the audience not wanting to see individualist X or Y per se. Rather, it is about individualism as such having become vulgar and boring and that no one wants to see any individual at all any longer. To the extent that there is any audience at all for anything at all in the old media, preferences are firmly oriented towards sundry variants of ironic freak show. This is the anxiety-relieving evening and weekend entertainment of consumtarians made passive (see The Netocrats) The truth is that only a small minority, the netocracy, understand and have mastered the Internet and can utilise the medium to their own advantage. This is in spite of the fact that almost the entire population of the world are already living their lives in the new social arena. In his book Average Is Over the American economist Tyler Cowen estimates that approximately 15 per cent of the American population will succeed in the transition to netocrats in a productive interaction with the Internet and the torrents of newly automated processes in society, while the remaining 85 per cent of the population will establish themselves as just a consumtariat, the fast-growing underclass in a social, cultural and also increasingly economic sense.
This results in agential realism defeating atomist individualism as the foundation of metaphysics. The network is not only a useful metaphor for understanding social relationships; the Universe is basically one large physical network in itself, where all phenomena, beside the fact that they themselves constitute constantly higher complexities of constantly lower sublevels, are universally entangled with each other. The entanglements are thus the fundamental, not the illusory, objects. Nothing occurs independently of something else. The result is a physics and a universe of fields, probabilities, energies and relationships, without any preordained laws or discrete objects. Thus all support for Kant’s fantasy of the holy object localised in a law-bound, determinist universe disappears. Kant, Newton and Einstein: all of them now appear to have been left behind. Time is real and the future is open and totally controllable.
The new power structure is strengthened by a new metaphysical narrative and vice versa. In this way, history repeats itself at every information technology paradigm shift. The tribe’s story is the foundation of paganism and its primitivist power structure. The story of God’s creation and control of the world forms the foundation of monotheism and the feudal power structure. The story of the genesis and perfection of Man as a rational being is the foundation of individualism and the capitalist power structure, while the story of how networks give content and meaning to everything in existence forms the foundation for syntheism and the informationalist power structure. Paganism uses survival as a metaphysical engine, while monotheism’s metaphysical engine is eternity and that of individualism is progress. Syntheism’s metaphysical engine is the event (see The Global Empire).
Capitalism is the third paradigm in the information technology writing of history. It emanates from the multifarious offshoot effects of the printing press and is characterised by the mass media, urbanisation, capital accumulation, mass education, industrialisation, globalisation and a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the workers. The Reformation expresses the definitive deification of the printed word. With this deification, monotheism’s blind faith in the possibilities of the manifestation is replaced by individualism’s blind faith in the potential of the proclamation. Capitalism is the golden age of the printed and mass-distributed ideologies. And since new proclamations can be constructed on top of old proclamations – when yesterday’s objectives in the factory have been attained, they are replaced by today’s new and loftier objectives for tomorrow –a metaphysics evolves out of the magic of the proclamation around progress as an idea. Similar to the way in which eternity is portrayed in monotheistic metaphysics, progress is portrayed in individualist metaphysics – regardless of whether it concerns liberalism’s evolving, individual person, or socialism’s five-year plan, collective society – as the manifestation of the indivisible, as something external and eternal in relation to all of life’s obvious transience.
According to Kant and his followers, rationalism is a necessary linchpin in individualist mythology. Individualism requires blind faith in Man’s own thinking – given time and necessity – being able to understand and solve all the world’s riddles and problems. While rationalism does accept that the individual is not omnipotent today, for the individual is evidently a mortal being, but with the individual’s omnipotence – since she actually is a latent god – according to rationalism, the solution to the problem can only be a matter of time. From the early 19th century onwards, individualist metaphysics becomes as conveniently as it is effectively self-fulfilling: individualism is proclaimed from the universities, and at the same universities, professors and researchers are also organised as individuals, encased in increasingly specialised subject area atoms, where they devote their days to quoting one another within closed coteries under the pretext that they are engaging in some sort of objectively true knowledge production. And as long as one stays within the mythology of individualist metaphysics – and why wouldn’t you, if you are part of the elite that reap the full rewards of it – it is hard to see the individualised human being in relation to the atomised world in any other way. The external signals that interfere with the generally held mythology are of course immediately removed by the system itself.
René Descartes opened the way to individualism by penning the 17th century’s most famous tweet: I think, therefore I am. But what consummates individualism’s metaphysics is Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalism a century later. By isolating the subject from the object, Kant makes it possible for the subject to both deify the object and simultaneously plan for its material and sexualised seduction, conquest and colonisation. History repeats itself: God created the world in order to be able to deify and then seduce, conquer and colonise it. Now it is the 18th century’s growing bourgeois middle class of patriarchal Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, industrialists, capitalists and colonists that see and grab the opportunity when the new individualist and atomist metaphysics lends support to their ambitions. Bourgeois ambitions are quite crassly transformed into the individualist ideal.
By adhering to a correlationist narrative around the subject’s and the object’s absolute isolation and delimitation, both from each other and from the surrounding world, the bourgeoisie succeeds in building an attractive identification with the subject, and the fantasy connected thereto of the conquest of the object as the perfection of history. Note that the subject is an individual and that the object is an atom: which are isolated, delimited, indivisible entities. Thus is individualism born, and with it also capitalist patriarchy. The individualist and atomist ideology is on fertile ground among the new elite, which it validates, and it rapidly becomes axiomatic and remains so right up until the arrival of the Internet age in the late 20th century. This is because individualism and its running-mate atomism are both tailor-made to promote the burgeoning bourgeoisie’s interests and hegemonic aspirations.
Kant is unarguably the prophet of individualism par excellence. His individual is a tragic solipsist who – precisely because of her solipsism – is free to act as a ruthless egoist. Kant’s radical subjectivism – with its emphasis on free will, dominance, abstract inner experiences and strict, soldier ethics – is built around the subject’s transcendental separation from the object, which means that the object can be deified undisturbed, to be later conquered, colonised and plundered. Individualism is a master ideology. The individual has taken over God’s place as the only thing that is certain in life according to Descartes’ basic tenet I think, therefore I am, which Kant later develops to perfection. Humanism and representationalism grow rapidly out of and presuppose individualism and atomism as metaphysical axioms. Through its prioritisation of the representation over the represented, representationalism suits exploding capitalism right down to the ground. With its actively observing subject and passively observed object – this object merely exists because the subject must have something to relate to – representationalism is a sublime expression of capitalist ideology. Society is based on strong, active, expanding subjects. Around them flock weak, passive, delimited objects, pining for the subject’s gaze and attention. These objects are to be hunted, conquered, tamed, exploited and finally discarded before the entire process is repeated with ever-new objects as targets.
There is, however, an object that the patriarchal gaze can never get enough of; an object that constantly evades the observer’s vain attempts at conquest, colonisation and plundering, and that is the object which finally gives its name to the entire paradigm in question, namely capital. Since capital constantly shuns patriarchal lust – no individual can ever be rich enough; somewhere there is always more money to be made, bigger profits to extract, increased growth to produce for anyone who simply gets a grip and refuses to be idle – individualism is strengthened by a tremendously potent metaphysical engine: progress.
Through the essential but subtle shift from the Cartesian subject focus to the Newtonian object fixation in Kant’s transcendentalism, individualism is extended into capitalism. And with the march of capitalism across the world, there also followed the markedly superstitious belief in the invisible hand as an eternal guarantor of never-ending growth. Exactly how naive this notion really is has now dawned on thinking people across the world as the crises-ridden nation states, one after another, drift away towards the precipice while impotent politicians and bureaucrats sit in fruitless meetings dreaming of a dramatic increase in growth that never eventuates. The Western welfare state, which is based on precisely such institutionalised wishful thinking about strong and continuous growth, is looking more and more like a cynical pyramid scheme. Future generations are welcomed with gigantic debts and badly eroded benefits. Not to mention the escalating environmental problems that arise as a result of capitalism’s intemperate, ruthless exploitation of the planet.
The university is individualism’s truth producer and this institution’s most important role is to moderate enjoyment among citizens. However, it continuously fails in its task, since enjoyment is only maximised in transgression, and transgression presupposes a host of prohibitions against crossing the boundaries for the taboos that the Church was much more adept at producing than the university. In this context, the university is reduced to the paltry imperative of identifying and subsequently maximising the individual’s enjoyment. Therefore, individualism’s complicated relationship with enjoyment is characterised by a fundamental envy of religion. In the 20th century, individualism was developed by the universities into cultural relativism, Kantianism’s ideological waste dump and its logical endpoint, where all that remains are unfounded solipsistic credos, the quality of which, because of a growing political hypersensitivity, it is forbidden to compare. This qualifies cultural relativism as syntheism’s ideological arch-enemy at the paradigm shift from capitalism to informationalism.
If history is viewed as a Hegelian dialectics, we see a clear pattern: monotheism is the thesis, individualism is the antithesis and syntheism is the synthesis. That syntheism is the synthesis in this dialectical process is a consequence of the fact that theism and atheism can never meet; they are fundamentally and definitionally incompatible. Syntheism should absolutely not be understood as a compromise between theism and atheism – in Hegelian dialectics, a synthesis is something considerably more sophisticated than just a banal coalescence of thesis and antithesis – rather, it is a necessary continuation of theism’s and atheism’s combined dichotomy, the only possible way out of the paralysing deadlock that arises when theism and atheism are pitted against each other. As the logical synthesis of this pair of opposites (theism versus atheism), syntheism offers a possibility for the atheist to go further and uncompromisingly deepen atheism. Thus, in a historical sense syntheism is a radicalised atheist ideology. It is even atheism’s logical deepening and elaboration.
We can therefore completely refrain from building even more constructions using the isolated objects that Kant uses as building blocks in his outdated metaphysics. But this does not mean that we are relativists. For relativism does not move sufficiently far away from individualism and atomism; it should rather be regarded as an inconsistent half-measure in the development from an understanding of existence as an atomist world full of discrete objects to the understanding of existence as a relationalist world consisting of irreducible multiplicities and endless relations. Even relativism must be dialectically developed into relationalism. There are no things whatsoever to relate between, which relativism requires; there are only relata that in turn always are relata to other relata, and so on ad infinitum.
The American philosopher Daniel Dennett connects memetics to a more extensive theory of mind in his book Consciousness Explained from 1991. According to Dennett, the majority of our memes are undisturbed and inactive in our brain, and only when the brain experiences a concrete change in its lifeworld does it react by accepting new or modifying old memes, in order to then spread them further. The mind, according to Dennett, consists of memes and only memes that have taken control of the brain and that think the thoughts of the host, and it can also be described in precisely this way. Thus, there is no longer any need for an individual in the Cartesian sense. Even the I-experience as such is a meme in itself and nothing else, albeit unprecedented in its success. It constitutes a phenomenon that we, with a clear reference to the father of individualism, call the Cartesian meme.
This functionalised and utility-centred view of religion stems to a large extent from the theories of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Interestingly enough, it is self-evident for Durkheim that capitalist ideologies such as nationalism and individualism must be regarded as religion’s latest forms of revelation. Ironically enough, two of memetics’ prominent figures – Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins – who are also two of militant, scientific atheism’s pioneering mouthpieces, speak for a diametrically opposed point of view. If the atheist Freud regards religion as an illusion determined by existential anxiety and feelings of defencelessness vis-à-vis the overwhelming and inexplicable forces of Nature, Dennett and Dawkins argue that the memeplexes of religion should be regarded as a dangerous virus that, without invitation and without offering any advantages whatsoever, penetrates people’s brains and devastates their cognitive abilities. Accordingly, religion’s role vis-à-vis mankind would be purely parasitical and not symbiotic in any respect.
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!
As physics migrates to informationalism and thereby becoming relationalist, a new view of humanity and a new world view are becoming apparent. Metaphysical individualism is dead; it disappears along with physical atomism, since these constitute two sides of the same outdated coin. Both stem from Kant’s onto-epistemology from the second half of the 18th century, which in turn is based on Descartes’ classic proposition “Cogito, ergo sum”, where the subjective experience is the only indisputable thing in existence and therefore constitutes the point of departure for all assertions about anything at all. This axiomatic subject then relates to other objects, which in the same way as the subject and its Cartesian theatrical stage is construed first as noumenal and then as phenomenal, indivisible entities with solid substances, that is, as individuals and atoms.
Individualism’s misleading anthropomorphisation of consciousness leads straight towards an impossible dead end. But it is not merely Kantian correlationism that must be discarded in conjunction with the necessary massive clean-out associated with the transition to relationalism. This also applies, to take one example, to all Eastern or New Age-related ideas of some kind of cosmic consciousness. The Universe not only lacks a brain to be conscious with: the Universe has de facto no incentive to acquire a consciousness, since consciousness is only produced in order to cover up the failings that are specific to the life situations of human beings. Not only is Man the only animal that talks – and thereby also thinks in the abstract – he is also the only animal who develops this ability in order to be able to survive at all. Language is developed as a Darwinian response to the human being’s evolutionary shortcomings. To speak and think is just the human being’s way of compensating for her own physical weakness and the evolutionary advantages of other animal species.
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.
One way of clarifying the difference between ethics and morality is to study a typical borderline case. Kant creates his transcendental philosophy in the 18th century in the borderland between monotheistic Christianity and atheistic individualism. On account of the growing German and French bourgeoisie, he carries out the self-imposed task of calculating how Man could replace God as the metaphysical centre of existence. Kant borrows the answer from Descartes and maintains that Man is the Master of existence for the simple reason that he can think. But existence can of course only be experienced by Man, the reason being that it requires a consciousness in order to be able to experience it and only Man thinks consciously. He is thus master of a house that he inhabits all by himself.
We thus live in an age that lacks a credible utopia, but that at the same time is coloured by a doomsday narrative that is every bit as powerful as it is threatening in the political discourse. Environmental issues are constantly on the agenda, as is the collective guilty conscience because these issues are constantly being down-prioritised by politicians who instead give priority to short-term measures on hip-pocket issues, measures that might perhaps yield the odd job opportunity but that also damage or preclude the necessary improvements in the environment. The growing plurarchy in a society where everyone talks at cross purposes, and increasingly vociferously focuses on pseudo-issues, evokes a paralysing state of hypercynicism (see The Netocrats). At the same time it is at precisely chaotic points in history of this type that new metaphysical systems are established – with Pauline Christianity in the crumbling Roman Empire and Kantian individualism in conjunction with the French Revolution as two very clear examples – and there is no reason to believe that our age should be any different in this respect.
This means that if syntheism is to be successful in establishing itself as the metaphysics of the Internet age, it must be constructed on the foundation of an entirely new utopia; an idea that in contrast to individualism in all its forms has credibility in the network society, where the individual is reduced to a curious remnant from a distant past. It must create the hope of the impossible being possible, even for informationalism’s people. Naturally syntheism has no chance of accomplishing this if it were to start from a capitalist perspective, since individualism is just as dead within philosophy as atomism is dead within physics. Syntheism’s utopia must instead be formulated as the consummate network dynamics. And how could a network be consummate, if it were not free and open to the surrounding world and the future in a contingent and relationalist universe?
From the 1960s onwards, individualism and its ally atomism are put under enormous pressure from a new supra-ideology: relationalism and its partner network dynamics. The capitalist patriarchy – from Napoleon onwards, probably the most evident individualist power structure – is attacked by feminism, which puts forth demands for equality between the sexes, and thereafter by the queer movement, with its requirements of equality between people of different sexual orientations and identities. The feminists represent female individuals’ interests, and the queer movement is fighting for sexually divergent individuals’ civil rights. This means, of course, that both these movements are still fundamentally individualist. The criticism against the patriarchy thus has come from inside the individualist paradigm. But the argumentation contains numerous network-dynamical arguments, for example that the woman’s freedom is also the man’s freedom from patriarchy, and that the liberation of homo- and transsexuals also entails the liberation of heterosexuals from narrow and repressive heteronormativity. The dividualist criticism thus begins from inside individualism – through informationalism liberating new desires and drives in the collective subconscious and thereby exposing the shortcomings of individualism – in order to slowly but surely establish a new, independent paradigm where the old individual is dead.
There is a risk of planet Earth becoming uninhabitable for human beings within a few generations – many of the various deleterious effects for which humans are responsible are already irreparable – unless this development leading towards the ecological apocalypse is halted and steered in an environmentally friendly direction. We already know how the capitalist society governed from the top-down, with individualism as the State religion, is managing the ecological apocalypse; this insidious catastrophe has of course been created by this system, which has subsequently shown that it is unable to rectify the damage. On the other hand, the growing and aspiring netocracy has a burning interest in saving the Earth for human life – and moreover access to a considerable arsenal of new communications tools with which to do this – in contrast to the cynical and resigned bourgeoisie. The free and open Internet is therefore a necessary milestone in order for ecological salvation to be possible at all.
The current rewriting of history enables the individualist epoch to be viewed with new, more critical eyes. For example, capitalism is exposed as the tyranny of numerical slavery par excellence. The deeper we delve into its exploitative nature, both ideologically and historically, the more clearly capitalism’s obsessive fixation with finally being able to mathematise all human thoughts and activities into a sum of dollars, a number of votes or a series of orgasms, emerges. No one illustrates this better than the American economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker, who in his work reduces all human activities to a kind of constantly ongoing rational calculation of utility. His work is about a consummate capitalist logic that takes Becker all the way into people’s bedrooms and places of worship – according to him, even an act of sexual intercourse is nothing other than a calculated, selfish utilitarian venture worked out in advance. What Becker thereby reveals about the seat of his own ideology is how rationalism, individualism, utilitarianism and – in all cases calculating and profit-maximising – capitalism really are one and the same ideology. Becker quite simply takes the Kantian paradigm and its isolated, compulsively colonising, patriarchal subject to the end of the road. And there he finds nothing other than an eternally empty calculator, grinding away.
Capitalism and its nation-state and corporativist bureaucracies optimise themselves, not by solving problems, but by creating more problems for themselves to solve, at the same time as more and more goods and services are demanded in order to satisfy a continuous stream of newly-produced needs. Therefore new laws are constantly being produced, new crime classifications, new pathologies, new defects, new failures to rectify, new problems to investigate, which one can later expand on even further, rather than rectify them. Postmodern society offers no catharsis and lacks a narrative of how the capitalist tragedy is to be brought to an end. Capitalism quite simply lacks an exit strategy. Liberal democracy’s dilemma is not primarily that it is based on obsolete individualism – liberalism is individualism’s political ideology par excellence – but rather that it is based on the myth of the invisible hand’s mystical self-regulation. But such a hand does not exist, an unregulated market always moves towards sundry variants of corrupt monopolies or oligopolies as their terminuses. The invisible hand cannot do anything itself to stop this; that can only be done by visible hands. Pragmatism defeats liberalism every day of the week in actual politics. Contingent disruptive technologies, when such emerge, and an innovative regulation of the market are, in the long term, much more important and healthier than any invisible hand.
Heraclitus is the first person in history who seriously both realises and formulates this. His universe is vertical and sees context as primary. Parmenides responds with a universe that is horizontal and sees sequences as primary. It is not the degree of truth of these statements themselves that determines which of these branches dominates the philosophical arena, but how well they match and adapt to the prevailing power structures. It is thus nothing other than the usefulness of Parmenides’ world view to the feudalist and capitalist elites that gives it its dominant status, right up until Whitehead’s and Bohr’s relationalism arrives when, after all this time, Heraclitus is proven right – at least for the time being. The Enlightenment’s three celebrated civilisational mainstays – the individual, the atom and capital – and the primordial forms of Kant’s subject and object, have their roots with Parmenides. At the same time as the network-dynamical revolution pulls the rug out from under the feet of individualism and atomism as well as capitalism, and thereby from Parmenides’ entire legacy.
Mobilist thinking has always factored in the emotions of beings; totalist thinking is instead based on a picture of beings as frozen objects. It is only when we consider Man as a disengaged external observer of existence, Kant’s fantasy, or as a disengaged isolated near-world without an authentic relationship to the surrounding world, Hegel’s fantasy, that we can accept that totalism displays any intellectual honesty whatsoever. On the other hand, for example Heidegger’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emotionally motivated and theological search for an engaged presence requires a correct overall picture of Man’s life-world, syntheology’s saving and concluding addition. Through the addition of Syntheos the syntheological pyramid is humanised. Only in this way can philosophy save its integrity from Laruelle’s anti-philosophical attacks and win a separate role from the otherwise all-embracing physics. Thanks to the constantly emotionally engaged human being’s actual presence, both in the world and in philosophy, syntheology’s last step is historically necessary. Oceanity is not just a wonderfully liberating feeling, a sweeping emotional experience, it is also the necessary antithesis of cynical isolationism, the necessary logical antithesis of individualism, the only way for thinking to dissolve and once and for all leave the philosophical prison of the dishonest Cartesian theatre.
Informationalism’s obsession with the event – that is, informationalism’s the event as the equivalent of monotheism’s eternity and individualism’s progress as the metaphysical engines that produce the dynamics within each of these paradigms – is driven by a greater fascination in the face of, and an obsession with, death than ever before in history. Regardless of whether we see Man’s deepest longing as a quest for survival (the driving force behind Pantheos) or as a quest for immortality (the driving force behind Atheos), we return to our obsession with death. Death as a concept thus operates constantly in the oscillation between Pantheos and Atheos. But what then does our obsession consist of? What is it that drives Badiou to turn all forms of meaning into a meaning based on a suddenly arisen truth event, which in turn reflects death?
In accordance with the reasoning above, if we regard atheism as an emergent phenomenon in relation to theism, the fundamental dismissal of the concept of God no longer appears as such – that is, that which gives the position its name – as its most important theological achievement. No, atheism’s most substantial achievement is its summation of all sorts of theist positions as a uniform and cohesive alternative to repudiate, that is, atheism’s dialectical construction of theism as an idea. Seen as an emergent phenomenon in relation to atheism, as the historical and intellectual intensification of atheism, syntheism in turn is a metareligion, a faith that its practitioners unabashedly practice as a pure religion in itself. Thereby it also confirms and supports all other art forms’ freedom to act from the metaperspective: art as art for art’s sake, literature as literature for literature’s sake, philosophy as philosophy for philosophy’s sake, and so on. And therefore syntheism instinctively rejects all of individualism’s calculations of utility. What syntheism seeks instead are the place and the time for itself as an event. This event is manifested within love, art, science, politics and religion: syntheology’s five generic categories.
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.
Without this blind ethics there is no subject for Levinas. Only in the meeting between strangers does metaphysical infinity appear. The relationship between the isolated subject and the isolated object, as its emotionally overburdened target, can hardly be made clearer than with Levinas. And what in fact was individualism’s built-in logical terminus if not this fundamentally banal mystification of the other? The only discernible way out is to make a clean break with individualism, as syntheism is doing. There is no cohesive subject which experiences itself as a permanent essence, either in itself or as a bizarre by-product of the romantic worship of the other. Instead the entanglement is primary. And in that entanglement, something entirely different from Levinas’ individualist infatuation, with its Abrahamic nostalgia, arrives.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58