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| Ernst Junger (1895-1998) |
I cannot hope to satisfy anyone with a definition of aesthetic experience, but let me wager that those moments that let me identify with the world a-subjectively – but not objectively – are commonly associated in my mind with bleakness. My brain chemistry, my environment, and similar contingent influences have rendered me this way. So be it. Bleakness manifests most often when I am faced with what is most distinctly impersonal: with cloudscapes and dimmed, wet treescapes. Or better yet, any time I witness a stark material disfiguration of the real by our species. And flowering from this is a bleak outlook correlated with the immense, consistent, and mostly hidden, suffering that is our history – our being. The intensity arising from the global reach of suffering becomes impressive when dislocated from the personal and the particular because then you realize that it belongs to us. Whatever the instigator the result is the same: I am alerted not just to the depths of unknowing that I embody, to the fact that I will never know most of life, but also to the industrial-scale sorrow consistently operative in being. All that is, is a misstep away from ruin...
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Today there are projects that explicitly register all this, and nonetheless intend to operate in line with the potentiality contained within the capacities of reason. What differentiates these projects, oftentimes rationalist in nature, is that they do not follow our various universalist legacies in simply conceiving of the general human as deserving of dignity simply because we all belong to the same class of suffering beings. This is not sufficient to make humans act well. The phenomenon of suffering is easily recognizable and most humans are acutely aware of it, and yet they continue to act in ways contrary to how we ‘ought’ to respond. In fact, it is clear that knowing the sheer scale of suffering may lead to hedonism, egoism or repression... [...]
One might suggest that we need only a minimal condition to be ethical. An appeal to the reality of pain in sentient and sapient creatures, perhaps. In that decision you might find solace – despite everything (or in spite of everything). It is a choice, however. Our attempts to assert an ethical universalism are bound up with a counter-logic: the bleak truth of contingency on the basis of the impersonal-in-the-personal. It is a logic quietly operative in the philosophical tradition and one I believe has been suppressed. Self-suppressed it flirts too much with a line leading us to the truth of our hallucination. It’s Nietzsche telling you about perspectivism hinging on the impersonal will-to-power and then you maturing, and forgetting...
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Speaking of sales, all kinds of new realism are being hawked on the various para-academic street-corners. All of them benefit from a tint of recognizability rooted, I would suggest, in the fact that ontological realism has always been hidden in plain sight; for any continentalist willing to look. What is different today is how the question of the impersonal attachments affecting the human comes not from inside philosophy, but from a number of external pressures. In what can only be described as a tragic situation for metaphysicians, truth now seeps into the discipline from the outside. We see thinking these days where philosophers promised there was none. The brilliance of continental realism lies in reminding us how this is an immense opportunity for philosophers to wake up from various self-induced slumbers, even if that means stepping outside the protected circle from time to time. It involves bringing this bubbling, left-over question of ontological realism right to the fore. This does not mean ontological realism will come to be accepted and then casually integrated into the tradition. If anything the backlash may eviscerate it, but the attempt will have been made. Or was, and quietly passed...
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Some need hope, no? As I write this I feel the beautiful soul rising from his armchair, but I do not want to hear it. Bleak theory is addressed to your situation: a first worlder inhabiting an accelerated malaise. The ethics to address poverty, inequality, and hardship will be different. Our own heads are disordered and we do not quite know how to respond to the field outside it. You will feel guilty for your myopia, and you deserve it, but you cannot elide by endlessly pointing to the plank in the other’s eye. You can pray through your tears, and in doing so ironically demonstrate the disturbance left by the death of God, but what does this shore up? It builds upon cathedral ruins: those sites where being is doubled-up and bent-over-backwards trying to look inconspicuous as just another option. Do you want to write religion back into being? Why not, as Ayache suggests, just ruin yourself? I hope it is clear I don’t have any answers: all clarity is a lie these days. I can only offer bleak theory as a way of seeing and perhaps a way of operating. It ‘works’ as follows: begin with confusion and shear away at what you can. Whatever is left is likely the closest thing approximating to what we name truth. It will be strictly negative. Elimination of errors is the best you can hope for...
I don’t know how to end this, so I am just going to end it.For those interested, After Nature blog has the following posts below which speak to many themes in the above article. To sum though, I think Nick Land said it best when he wrote that the "God or Nature" decision is a decision of equivalence, as there is only one law that all must obey, and in fact, Gnon has no other supreme principle. One law, and one only: "Reality Rules."
Nature can seem as inspiring, beautiful, strong and nurturing as a mother, but it would be foolish to believe that this ‘mother’ loves us. There’s no reason we can’t celebrate her glorious natural gifts while also appreciating the important ‘unnatural’ improvements our fellow humans have created.I think the last sentence begs the thought of how nature and culture relate, with nature being the more encompassing category as the "unnatural" is still nature. We must remember that nature is whatever is in whatever way it is. Thus nature's scope encompasses a full range of value of what is - both bleak and bright, natural or "unnatural," beautiful or abhorrent.
These anthropocentric worries over human continuity make for a strange tension in the theoretical moment: they are appearing just as a range of disanthropic moves have attempted to decenter and displace the human as subject, agent, or figure: Actor-Network Theory, Post-Humanism, multi- and interspecies analytics, Object Oriented and other “ontological” turns, speculative realism and new materialism, to name a few. Despite this turn away from the human, however, the final disappearance of the species seems to mark a limit for most disanthropic theorists; few welcome the possibility of human extinction. Disanthropy yes, misanthropy no.
[M]isanthropy needs rethinking: perhaps it is time for a serious misanthropology. In their now famous book What is Life?, the biologist Lynn Margulis and her co-author and son Dorion Sagan revel in the productivity of the biosphere, where, with or without us, Gaia will exuberantly continue to spawn multiple life-forms. They propose not only a more expansive notion of forms of life, which would include biospheric processes, but ask us also to consider a more expansive notion of consciousness, one recognizing that “at even the most primordial level living seems to entail sensation, choosing, mind” (1995, 220). For them the biosphere as a whole is conscious; the planet is a “vast sentience.” Admittedly, humans play a crucial role in this mind, as “our technology-extended intelligence becomes part of planetary life as a whole,” forming the “brain or neural tissue of a global being.” This “global being,” however, will persist even after good old anthropos is done with. Margulis and Sagan make it clear that they are not afraid of climate change.
This is not unlike the transhumanist position of celebrating the self-evolution of humans into a non-carbon-based, superintelligent being. There, too, matter is understood as having been intelligent all along, with the human as merely a temporary instantiation. For transhumanists, the supreme unit of this evolution is information. They argue that soon this intelligence, in the form of information processing or computation, will become so vast and complex that the world itself will no longer be recognizable or predictable by us – the threshold that they call the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil is the most famous champion of this path to human obsolescence, and much has been written about his views (including by me). In his vision, if the end of humanity is a portal to greater consciousness, then we ought to celebrate that end as good in itself, without parochial anthropocentric anxieties. The goal of developing computational power, then, is not to avoid our extinction but to accelerate our obsolescence: the ultimate technofix.
In some ways, this fascination with a world without us is not new. What’s interesting about the current misanthropic end-time views – from the low-tech VHEMT to the super high-tech singularity, from simple extinction to heat death or cold death of the universe – is that they emerge out of science, rather than being religious left-overs. They are the outgrowth of a long discursive line in secular science that begins at least in the mid-19th century, when Rudolf Clausius, presenting his formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, declared that the universe tends inexorably towards entropy. I think that we could go back further, though, to the original disanthropic turn: the Galilean-Copernican revolution, which knocked the earth off center at the same time as it materially (through the use of lenses and new forms of visibility) and mathematically (with new equations and understandings of planetary motion) expanded the universe, producing a radical sense of human finitude. This was picked up and articulated by Pascal, who passed it on to Schopenhauer, who turned it into anxiety, and ultimately Weber, who turned it into disenchantment. They did so as men of science, ruminating not on the eschaton but on the meaning of finitude and progress.
Today, science toggles between entropy and creativity as dominant narratives for understanding the future of the cosmos. The probability of life and consciousness in the universe, as well as its demise on our planet, is now subject to scientific rationality: given the conditions of the universe, the development of complexity into life and consciousness was inevitable, in which case of course there likely are others like us and our rock out there. Or perhaps it is the complete converse: it was ridiculously impossible, and this weird Rare Earth is doomed to disappear as meaninglessly and singularly as it appeared. Everything is fine-tuned for our type, or everything is hostile to our type. In the scientific imaginary, the universe is either anthropic or misanthropic.
Neoreaction says, “There is objective value in the principle of “perpetuating biological and/or civilizational complexity” itself*; the best way to perpetuate biological and/or civilizational complexity is to “serve Gnon” (i.e. devote our efforts to fulfilling nature’s pre-requisites for perpetuating our biologial and/or civilizational complexity); our subjective values are spandrels manufactured by natural selection/Gnon; insofar as our subjective values motivate us to serve Gnon and thereby ensure the perpetuation of biological and/or civilizational complexity, our subjective values are useful. (For example, natural selection makes sex a subjective value by making it pleasurable, which then motivates us to perpetuate our biological complexity). But, insofar as our subjective values mislead us from serving Gnon (such as by making non-procreative sex still feel good) and jeopardize our biological/civilizational perpetuation, we must sacrifice our subjective values for the objective good of perpetuating our biological/civilizational complexity” (such as by buckling down and having procreative sex even if one would personally rather not enjoy raising kids).
Your talk of “dark” vitalism reminded me of the great August Weissman’s fundamental distinction between the immortality of the germ plasm and the mortality of the soma, translated into meme and vehicle by Richard Dawkins. “Dark” vitalism seems to go back to the idea that we are hosts to a mindless parasite that uses us for its own purposes. There is a version of the “old vitalism” that recommends to us that we embrace the parasite. It meant embracing somatic death for the sake of the immortal germ plasm. “Dancing on the abyss.” Very heady German romantic stuff. Ernst Juenger as you point out was one of the exponents of this. (Not so much Nietzsche, at least as I read him. But the Juenger folks certainly thought he was on their side.) Futurism and Expressionism is full of this, what they called “pathos.” Today, the pathos is gone and the advocates of “embrace the parasite/meme” see it, as you say, as a sort of cool objectivity, a rejection of the “wam, fuzzy” vitalism of Driesch et al.
Those who knew Gilles Deleuze consistently note his firm commitment to joyful affirmation and his distaste for the ressentiment of negativity. Beatifying this sentiment, Deleuzians have established a whole canon of joy. But what good is joy in this world of compulsive positivity?
It is time to move from the chapel to the crypt. There is sufficient textual evidence to establish this counter-canon. And from it, we can create a glossary of the “Dark Deleuze.”
| Joyous: | Dark: | |
| Our Task | Create Conceptions | Destroy Worlds |
| Substance | Techno-Science | Political Anthropology |
| Existence | Genesis | Transformation |
| Ontology | Realism | Materialism |
| Subjects | Assemblages | Un-becoming |
| Speed | Acceleration | Withdrawal |
| Diagrams | Complexity | Asymmetry |
| Affects | Intensity | Cruelty |
| Flows | Production | Interruption |
| Difference | Inclusive Disjunction | Exclusive Disjunction |
| Organization | Rhizome | Unfolding |
| The Sensible | Experience | Indiscernibility |
| Distribution | Crowned Anarchy | The Outside |
| Cinema | The Forces of Bodies | The Powers of the False |
| Nomadism | Pastoral | Barbarian |
| Politics | Molecular | Cataclysmic |
| Ethics | Processural Democracy | Immanent Communism |
