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Singularity
An extraordinary historical event that immediately changes world history at a fundamental level. From an anthropocentric perspective, the genesis of the Universe, life and consciousness qualify as singularities. Since a singularity to a high degree is an emergent phenomenon that can never be predicted, according to syntheism there is no other word for a potential fourth, future singularity than the name God.
Deleuze prophetically sees how the onrushing Internet age – which he consistently refers to as capitalism with schizophrenia in his key works Anti-Oedipus and Mille plateaux, authored with Felix Guattari – rules out the classical majoritarian claims to power. Baradian relationalism goes a couple of steps further in the same direction. There are no secure majoritarian identities left when we start to apprehend the extent of the quantum physics revolution. All remaining identities, except the Universe itself, are quite simply minoritarian with Barad. In order to produce an identity other than that of the Universe, there needs to be a clear minoritarian difference, which is why only the strongest minoritarian identity can generate what Lacan’s and Zizek’s predecessor Hegel calls the universal singularity.
An event is a spectacular occurrence, a revolution is a spectacular event, and a singularity is a spectacular revolution. Events of various importance take place several times per year, genuine revolutions only once or twice per millennium. Singularities are easily counted, from an anthropocentric perspective we can only be said to have gone through three singularities: the commencement of the Universe, the genesis of life and the birth of consciousness. The question is whether we can imagine such a fourth singularity. For syntheism however the answer is clear. The fourth singularity must be God’s entry into history. For whatever it is that would be able to match the weight of the emergent genesis of existence, of life and of consciousness earlier in history, for the people of today it must have the same weight as if God suddenly appeared. Whatever it is that is hiding beyond the fourth dimension, its right and only name is God. Thereby the interesting question is what the arrival of God might be and what forms it might assume.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou, one of Jacques Lacan’s most well-known successors, starting with his work Being and Event, constructs a complete philosophical system based on the informationalist event as the deepest truth about Man’s existence. The biological, mental, and social structures that characterise Man are empirically verifiable generalities, and as such are of course contingent. The truths we produce and know of are dependent on this contingency, which summarises them all. Being is not everything to Man, as the totalist philosophers imagine. Thinking can very well be constructed with its starting point in ontology’s constant inconsistency instead of using the fictive being as the basis. However, Badiou argues that the universal is independent on the contingency. Every singularity in itself consists of an infinitely internal chaos, but through the singularity’s internalisation of this chaos, a kind of encircling stability is created around the chaos which makes the universal’s identity possible. From a geometric perspective, we can express this by saying that it is the stable ring around what is transient and chaotic that is the actual singularity; a stable universe around chaotic matter, a stable life around a chaotic biology, a stable consciousness around a chaotic hodgepodge of thoughts, followed by God as a kind of stable ring around a chaotic future.
Badiou assumes that thinking is universality’s true element. In the same way that the event arises as a result of the circumstances that prevail where it materialises – not in the capacity of the event per se – the universal stands above and free from the chaotic contingency. A truth is derived from the set of circumstances under which it is produced – regardless of whether these circumstances are social, psychological, or cognitive – but only the truth that satisfies Badiou’s specific criteria for an authentic truth can be regarded as a universal. It is here that Badiou uses the concept singularity. The authentic truth is characterised by the fact that it is in fact a singularity; it cannot in itself be subordinated to any particular previous particularity, group or identity. And it arises through an act, through an intervention, which establishes a subject/object relation within a specific, larger phenomenon. Waves become particles, chaos becomes cosmos, mobility is eternalised, and so on. Thereby a genuine truth can be established, after which there is no way back whatsoever.
Never before has the ethical imperative of the truth as an act been clearer. What then follows in a Badiouian scenario is that the activism that emanates from the three unnamable names Atheos, Entheos and Pantheos builds the stable foundation for Syntheos, the formalisation and realisation of the utopia. Since syntheism’s mobilist universe is both contingent and indeterministic, obviously Syntheos cannot be realised through the historical objective’s mystical, eschatological arrival, in keeping with what Marxism and the Abrahamic religions so imaginatively preach. Syntheos is instead realised through a focused but nomadic, creative activism in a capricious, contingent universe, driven by the hope of the impossible suddenly appearing and being realised as the fourth singularity – an idea which is consummated by being theologised by Badiou’s declared syntheist disciple Quentin Meillassoux. The lesson from both Badiou and Levinas is that life-long devotion to truth as an act is the innermost existentialist substance of metaphysics.
Badiou maintains that every universal singularly is open vis-à-vis the future and remains constantly unfinished. It is not concerned with our mortality or general fragility. He sums up universality as the faithful construction of an infinite, generic multiplicity where the multiplicity must be primary since the One is merely a verbal illusion (that is, the One is the eternalised fictive par excellence, if we use a syntheological vocabulary). Multiplicity is merely a linguistic singular; any singular outside the irreducible plurality does not exist. Every universality is exceptional, has its origin in a single emergence, is assembled step by step, is the consequence of an existential decision, generates an ethical subject and is based on a becoming in an active truth and not on any specific knowledge. Badiou argues that philosophy obviously comprises the art of analysing, but above all is the art of articulating universalities. The truth event arises, according to him, ex nihilio. To begin with, this event is invisible rather than obviously identifiable where and when it occurs. It is not possible to predict or trace based on the circumstances around the situation where it occurs. Instead the truth event gets its status from the faithful subsequently, and its general acceptance is determined by the strength and perseverance of the faithful, their loyalty. It is quite simply the faithful who must make the event true; it can only get its status as a singularity by means of an aesthetic retrospectivity.
The singularity is defined by the fact that it overthrows the prevailing rules of the game, it begins a new era, it sends out a powerful shock wave through the ethical subject, which is changed so radically that we must speak of a kind of rebirth. Note that the truth event is always internal, it occurs from the inside out rather than from the outside in. It can thus not be forced by some external power that invades the phenomenon in some mysterious way. This means that, for example, military interventions and incoming meteorites are never events in this specific sense. This is where Badiou’s ethical imperative breaks radically with Kant’s moral imperative. According to Kant, Man becomes an authentic individual by carrying out his duty. According to Badiou, it is instead a necessity to oppose the external norm, vis-à-vis the accepted duty. According to Badiou, it is this opposition to the norm and not the fulfilment of duty that is the condition for living subjectivity. The singularity is a cultural and not a natural phenomenon. Badiou’s ethical imperative entails that Man becomes an authentic dividual by opposing the prevailing norm and fighting for a new world order with an eye to the syntheist utopia.
What death then reveals is of course how little we mean, how little we will be missed after our decease, how simply and almost offensively painlessly life goes on without us. And what we feel guilty about at the deepest level is the lack of guilt when other people die and disappear for good from our own lives. Life goes on: what else should it do? It is precisely here that death constantly chafes against our existential experience. We can never motivate for ourselves precisely why we should be so interesting and important for Pantheos that Pantheos would need to maintain us after death for Pantheos’ own sake. It is not a desire for immortality that drives us; merely a banal fear of death as the definite singularity after which nothing is the same any more. The postponement of this event is the will to survival, and this will is formalised through all the other lesser events to which we ascribe a decisive importance during both our own history and the history of all of humanity.
Meillassoux argues that the first singularity is the genesis of existence per se, the second singularity occurs at the genesis of life and the third singularity occurs at the genesis of thinking. He then takes a giant leap into the future and argues that in a contingent world a fourth revolution of the same importance is both possible, likely and above all desirable, and then in true syntheist spirit he casts God in the role of the fourth, and for mankind the final, step. We write in true syntheist spirit, not just because Syntheos is the created God placed in the future, but also because Meillassoux declares that his concept of God is to be understood based on the dogma that a belief in God’s existence does not entail that one believes in God, but that one believes in existence. There is in Meillassoux, as in all syntheists, no way around or out of the theological project. Metaphysics is not a choice, but an absolute necessity that everything else is fundamentally dependent upon.
Meillassoux bases his philosophical system on four concepts: potentiality, contingency, virtuality and chance. These constitute two spheres of being. At the local level, potentiality is pitted against chance; at the global level virtuality is pitted against contingency. His Syntheos is justice, where justice consummates a history that runs via existence, life and thinking as the previous immanent miracles. Note that according to Meillassoux, a miracle is to be understood as proof that God does not exist. Rather, miracles open up the possibility of the Universe being God – a universe as a god that expresses itself to itself. But as the radical indeterminist that Meillassoux is, he opens the way for the possibility that justice never occurs (a reminder of the neutral position of Badiouian ethics). And above all, Meillassoux claims that justice can never occur unless it is first desired. His god is thereby the Marxist god par excellence. But it is a contingent Marxist god in an indeterministic world with a wide-open future, a singularity that Karl Marx himself would scarcely have understood.
At any rate, what is essential is that the Parisian street riots would be unthinkable without the printing press that became fully and widely accepted in society only after several transforming centuries. It first changed Europe and then the rest of the world beyond recognition, and the French Revolution’s geographical domicile has much more to do with the fact that France was the first country where a majority of the population could read and write than them being extraordinarily innovative or clear-headed. For Badiou and Zizek, it appears necessary to first let the singularity take place, thereafter wait for it to generate a new power structure, only to then wait for a bloody conflict within the new power structure – where the otherwise obese and physically the worse for wear philosophers indeed promise to man the barricades themselves and throw Molotov cocktails at the authorities – only to thereafter be able to speak of a genuine revolution. Hegel would most likely not accept such a static and culture-specific idea of revolution. It was hardly the intention that Paris in 1789 would fix the meaning of the word revolution, which in fact is a metaconcept, for all eternity in the way that the essentially conservative revolutionary romantics Badiou and Zizek assume. That is, with the revolution as the consistently failing, tragic repetition of the event in Paris in 1789, moreover always carried out by angry young men with weapons in their hands and oppressed by an authoritarian tyrant whose boots they love to lick.
It seems, ironically enough, as though Badiou’s and Zizek’s nostalgic notion of revolution suffers from a glaring lack of, precisely, the revolutionarity. The syntheists, on the other hand, have their sights set on something much more radical. The singularity is the definitive event according to the criteria we use in this book. And there are already three parallel revolutions in progress – even if Badiou and Zizek with their conservative templates and blinkers appear unable to apprehend them – namely: The expansion of the Internet, the relationalist paradigm shift within both physics and sociology and last but not least the chemical liberation. The singularity that is our transition from humanity to transhumanity is one of the three revolutions’ merging supraevents in a not too distant future. The fourth singularity in history is already waiting in the wings. All we need to do is take Critchley’s advice which tells us to first build the syntheist temples and monasteries, where through our subtraction from the surrounding world we can enable the revolution as the truth as an act of our time. We are ourselves the fourth singularity!
So if revolutions only occur of their own accord – whether they are emergent or contingent phenomena – how can syntheists steer the three dramatic and parallel revolutions of our time towards a single common event: the singularity? In the world of physics, a singularity is a state where temperature, pressure and curvature are infinite at the same time. In such a singularity a universe, for example, can expand ten million times in a single moment, which makes possible, for example, the cosmic inflation in conjunction with the birth of our own universe. The singularity is a possibility for a universe such as ours to arise spontaneously. Precisely because the universal expansion is an expansion within nothing, it may be inflationary, far beyond the speed of light (which is otherwise the greatest possible speed within this universe). So how does syntheism relate to the Universe? What characterises the relationship between Man and his feared superior – the Universe?
The original lie, the original crime, the phantasmic narratives that hold together the subject and the impossible gaze of the now: all this is part of syntheism’s political ideology. The law is the third person present in all relations between dividuals. But syntheism is something much greater: it is instead the step outside of the eternal cycle of mythology production and incessant disappointment. In its capacity as a genericism, the syntheist political project must have the universal singularity as its point of departure. As networking dividuals, we no longer produce things, we produce social life itself. The question is who can play the role as the universal singularity during the introductory phase of the Internet age. How will this social production influence the emerging classes in the cyber world: the netocrats and the consumtarians? Will they be lured by the same capitalist temptations that seduced their individualistic predecessors, or will they succeed in seeing through these illusions? Or will they instead fall prey to entirely new illusions?
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58