BOTH NIETZSCHE AND HIS cousin Darwin spent a large part of the twentieth century locked in the poison cabinet. Being a Nietzschean or a Darwinist was hardly a winning career strategy in any context, with the possible exception of some highly specialised scientific niche. Both systems of thought, in a coarsely distorted and manipulated form, had been exploited for the most vulgar propaganda purposes imaginable, where Nazis and racists tried to create legitimacy for their superstitious message. In their unadulterated form, though, both Nietzsche’s and Darwin’s thinking, because their anti-humanism and extreme materialism were out of kilter with the age, was completely unusable in ideological terms. Neither Nietzscheanism nor Darwinism was in harmony with the supreme ideology of the capitalist paradigm, and no social class seemed able to gain any advantage by calling upon or nurturing thinking in these terms.
This is the great change, the paradigm shift, which is happening on the ideological plane as a result of informationalism: Nietzsche and Darwin are suddenly contemporary. Those who are inclined to see life from the perspective of these thinkers are favoured by circumstances and are forming the new elite: the netocracy. And this perspective alone forms a credible, supremely ideological starting point for the political philosophy of informationalism. The task therefore is to change the Versuch of Nietzschean ethics into a political project on a global scale. The metaphysical basis for informationalist philosophy is becoming, for reasons which have been elaborated in the two previous chapters, our innate and inexhaustible need for a metaphysical basis itself. And there can be no more stable basis on which to build.
Thinking stems from perception, which constitutes an immense production and management of fictives, of which the point is primary in space, and the now primary in time. Despite the fact that neither point nor now exist in a mobilistic sense – in other words, beyond perception and conceptual apparatus – the whole of our worldview is based upon variations of these infinite magnitudes. Language and logical intelligence presuppose, for instance, the eternalist concept of the ego (human existence imagined as a point) and being (human existence imagined as a now). The distance from immanence which is necessary if we are to be able to produce functional thought makes every human being a more or less conscious eternalist in a mobilistic environment.
What is meant by the infinite character of the point is that we perceive it as a magnitude which is divisible into infinity: every point consists of a number of smaller points, which in turn consist of even smaller points, and so on. The point is therefore an infinitesimal magnitude; this is not to say that it is the opposite of infinity, but rather the complementary underside of infinity. On closer inspection, therefore, the point dissolves into an endless intensity, which makes the point as a concept fundamentally contradictory. The paradoxical way of handling this dilemma is to use the merciless principle of the eternal return of the same. This results in the realisation that the point is not so much a point as an idea of a point, an eternalisation of the mobilistic torrent which is vital for perception. And the same applies to all phenomena, including spacetime itself: they are fictives.
Here Hegel’s most important insight becomes relevant: it is not enough to say that we produce our own worldview ourselves, we even produce the very preconditions for the production of a worldview. However, eternalism takes its leave of Hegelianism in its next step, when it goes on to proclaim a transcendental linearity, a dialectic progression in which a thesis is followed by an antithesis, where the contrast between them dissolves into a synthesis of a higher order. For eternalism, this is a rationalist construction in hindsight of a considerably more complex transrational process, because the entire worldview – the totality of experienced phenomena in experienced spacetime – is not constructed of disparate fragments, but instead precedes, of necessity, the comprehension of the various components.
This means that the synthesis is primary in eternalist dialectics, instead of the relationship between thesis and antithesis. Marx had good material reasons to put Hegel on his feet, and therefore turned Hegel’s absolute idealism into what he perceived as an absolute materialism. Eternalist thinking does the same thing, in another respect, when, inspired by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s constructive criticism of Hegel’s pseudo-mobilistic totalism, it reverses the dialectic order. The fact is that this reversal in extension also means that eternalism puts Hegel’s totalistic predecessors on their feet. Eternalism can, therefore, be usefully regarded both as an inverted platonism: we do not need the world in order to be able to understand ideas, but instead produce the ideas in order to understand the world; and as an inverted Cartesianism: we do not exist because we think; we exist, therefore we think.
The revolutionary consequence of this philosophical u-turn is that history is separated from determinism and restored to immanent reality. Eternalism, quite simply, insists that the view of reality really is just a view, with all the implications of interpretation and individual creation, and not faithful reflection, that this suggests; just as it insists that an idea of totality always forms an unavoidable reference to which one or other phenomenon must be related if a perception is to be established at all, and must therefore be regarded as unavoidable even for perception and thought themselves. Eternalist philosophy turns the historical direction of philosophy’s overriding ambition through 180 degrees: it is no longer a matter of constructing a credible totality (as under totalism), but of working out exactly how absolute movement is constantly tearing apart and deconstructing the totality which human beings have already created. The unavoidability of totality for thought can be expressed within eternalism as the synthetic origins of the subject.
The great mistake of classical philosophy, regardless of whether God is mixed up in the equation or not, is to elevate thought – in other words: its own activity – to the absolute pinnacle of creation, a divine gift of transcendental origins, an insight into everything natural, and a bridge over to the supernatural, instead of simply seeing thought as a product of evolution, a technology of immanent origin which exists for the simple reason that it brings with it certain advantages in the perpetually raging struggle between and within the species, for space and resources. Thanks to the meeting of Darwin and Heidegger, eternalism leaves thought to Dasein, becoming, and therefore puts a stop to philosophy’s desire to localise thought beyond immanence, as some sort of perfect form in a pure and unbesmirched highest heaven of existence.
After Kant and the understanding that there is a fundamental difference between the noumenal and the phenomenological worlds, there is ultimately no other way forward for anyone wishing to move on but to accept the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism as the cosmic foundation. This is the eternalist philosophy: simultaneously an open, mobilistic system and a closed, eternalist totality, in constant interaction with each other, but without ever becoming united as a result of this. There are no phenomena in the immanent sense, only a noumenal chaos. Distance and volume, past and future, subject and object – all these preconditions for or variants of the point and the now – are fictives, which we are forced to regard as real, because such a view is both required and rewarded by evolution.
Perception, or, in other words, the production and management of primary fictives, is, in one way or another, a necessary instrument for survival for all animal species. Thought, or, in other words, the production and management of secondary fictives, is, on the other hand, something unique to human beings, at least when we are talking about thought in any advanced form. This explains why such a large proportion of our planet’s bio-mass consists of human beings: among the animal species, we have the unique capacity to imagine alternative configurations in spacetime in relation to the current image of circumstances pertaining in reality. Not only do we have the capacity to produce fictives, but also to set these fictives in motion against one another in a fictive world which we have at our disposal. The eternalist world is transformed into a second-rate mobilistic chaos, which is re-eternalised only to be set in motion again at once. This process never ends, it is itself mobilistic, and in this process the whole wasteful wealth of alternative worldviews is created, virtual worlds which can be compared and played off against one another. They are our memories, identities, premonitions, fantasies, wishes, myths, stories, theoretical reasonings… and so on. They are the cultural element of our nature.
Thought can, in relation to perception, be seen as a turbo compared to an engine: it exploits the energy expressed and pushes it back into the system. In this reinforced, expanded perceptual process, hypothetical alternatives to the current version can be constructed anyhow and localised anywhere within experienced spacetime. These alternatives form the secondary fictives, those relations created by us between the primary fictives, the components in the mobilistic chaos of thought. This creation of fictions has a more important function here than in the process of perception, where it fills the vacuum between impulses from the sensory organs with pre-programmed expectations so that the result is a cohesive totality. In thought, it single-handedly produces complete worlds. In the management of these secondary fictives, language arises, along with a self-image in relation to a worldview. We experience ourselves as conscious of ourselves and of the world.
The secondary fictives are managed and communicated both within consciousness and between people with the help of language. But when the mobile consciousness, in the form of an equally mobile language, is to be perceived and interpreted, it in turn must be eternalised. This secondary eternalisation process is carried out by a production of metafictives. When these in turn are managed and communicated, movement occurs, the shift from mobilism to eternalism moves to a new stage of mobilism, which in turn must be eternalised in order to be understood and interpreted, and so on. Consciousness oscillates constantly between a given movement and a fictive fixation, encompassing both of them, without letting itself be blocked by the contradiction.
This is the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism, the principle under which individual thought has always operated, which has also become the principle of philosophy, but only after the breakthrough of interactivity. It is only since the arrival of the interactive media technologies that collective thought has begun to operate under the same principles as individual thought, which has in turn made possible the understanding and acceptance of how thought actually functions which the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism offers. The rapidly expanding interactivity in society means that the structure of the collective subject is taking a step closer to the structure of the individual subject – because the latter has always been based upon the principle of interactivity – and, beyond this, with all the colossal power which only the united collective can call upon, when it is now, on a global level, set in the internal resonance which is necessary for the subject to be understood as existing.
In contrast to totalistic philosophy, which moves along a straight line from question to answer, from origin to fate, eternalist philosophy lacks both beginning and end. It takes place in the middle of an imagined line between the two abstract poles of mobilism, the infinite and the infinitesimal, and the space which Deleuze calls a milieu: a world which must be imagined as both a point in the middle of a flat surface and at the same time a point in the middle of a line, without being able to leave this relative position, simply because this is by definition impossible, regardless of speed and spacetime, to approach either end of a scale between two infinities.
One illustrative example of the complexity of paradoxist dialectics – where the dialectic, nota bene, is acted out in the eternalist sphere – is the two contradictory ways of seeing that are necessary to capture modern physics’ view of the phenomenon of light, where both ways of seeing are correct in spite of the fact that they cannot be correct at the same time. Quantum physics, as is well-known, regards light both as a particle, a so-called photon, and as a wave motion. But the observer is forced to choose a perspective: when the particle is in focus, the wave motion disappears, and vice versa. In both cases, naturally, it is a question of a conceptual application, in other words, an eternalisation of a complex of chaotic movement. But which phenomenon we perceive is entirely dependent upon what we are looking for and the way in which we choose.
This means that our understanding of the qualities of light is not primarily determined by the light’s own characteristics, but by the pre-understanding of the observer; it is in the first instance not the object which produces the phenomenon – even if its noumenal characteristics influence the phenomenological process – but its subject. But here we are dealing with a subject which is radically different to that perceived by the Cartesian paradigm. Because one and the same subject in this model can assume a mass of different subject-positions, it is no longer the classic individual, who remains unaffected by what he observes, but instead the eternalistic dividual, who arises through and is a part of the observation, who observes his surroundings in the case in question.
The transition from the balanced models of classical physics to the programmatic contradictions of quantum physics reveals that the former never had anything to do with any innate, transcendental truth about life which exists somewhere in life itself, outside the observer. Neither perception nor thought is intended, in spite of rationalism’s naïve faith in the reverse, to uncover the innermost secrets of life, but has instead been polished over millions of years by a natural choice which has merely favoured whatever was functional within the frame of given ecological circumstances. It is, in other words, purely a question of survival. The idea that classical physics seems logical and is confirmed by our sensual perceptions, whereas quantum physics seems incoherent and difficult to reconcile with our experiences of the phenomenon, says less about life itself than it does about the conditions of humankind. In the same way that it was once functional to consume as many calories as possible, because starvation was a far greater risk that obesity, it was functional to regard the world in line with the so-called laws of natural physics and act accordingly. Some memes were simply more viable than others. Quantum physics, like dieting and exercise, is nothing more than a late, premium arrival where human survival is concerned.
Once we have crawled over a threshold, the path back is cut off. Once we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, it is not possible to erase the experience. When we leave the worldview in which humanity has dwelt for what is in this context an extremely long time, we are stepping into worlds which have in a sense always been there, but which it has neither been meaningful nor even possible to explore. Now our new knowledge is a fact, and forms a fundamental component in our understanding of life in general, and of informationalist society in particular. In line with a changing ecology, it is becoming possible, and necessary, to replace the obsolete worldview with a new one, because we have realised that a pre-programmed totality is a precondition for our orientation in spacetime. New circumstances favour certain new memes at the expense of others.
In the case of light, we can confirm that the search for and the production of a light particle is a traditional eternalisation of an ungraspable, mobilistic torrent. This is the norm when we fix a more or less arbitrary extract of chaos and transform it into a stable object, fixed in spacetime, in this case a photon. But if we instead look at a wave motion, we leave the classic production model for fictives and approach mobilistic reality, immanence, by constructing an abstract fictive – admittedly a stable phenomenon of necessity, but with a marked element of noumenal chaos, a hybrid of a classic fictive and an historically new form of fictive, localised to a context characterised by consciousness of the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism.
We can express this by saying that we are eternalising an imagined mobilisation of an imagined eternalisation of a mobilistic phenomenon. We are thus producing a metafictive, which should otherwise be regarded as a secondary fictive, but without in this case – and against what so-called common sense would dictate – first establishing a primary fictive as the basis for our metafictive. The primary fictive is merely assumed, an as yet unopened parcel whose contents we are not even curious about. It is in this process that quantum physics’ break with classical physics, like eternalist philosophy’s break with classical philosophy, becomes visible.
In the same way that quantum physics insists that both particle and wave motion are two separate but, in terms of truth, equally correct observations of light, eternalist philosophy also insists that eternalism and mobilism are two separate but nonetheless equally correct and also mutually dependent aspects of existence. The deeper understanding of life that Heidegger calls for demands both perspectives, which in turn demands a practised ability to handle contradictions, and to change perspective instantly, according to the situation, in full awareness that the current perspective is merely one side of the matter. This in turn demands that every dream of a finality and unambiguity is replaced by a joy and a sense of belonging within a constantly revised provisional solution.
This causes difficulties. The contradictions of quantum physics cause wear and tear, as shown in our instinctive desire to fictivise the field by dividing the wave-movement into smaller components, in other words: creating a long series of points. But with this the movement would stop being a movement, and quantum physics does not permit this, and eternalist philosophy can help us to understand why, and teach us to accept it. It is of course a fact that the field as a directly produced metafictive in several respects better reflects the qualities of noumenal chaos than a primary fictive could, which takes us closer to an understanding characterised by absolute movement, in other words: constant movement in relation to constant movement. This in turn can facilitate our acceptance of the necessary return to mobilism, which is constantly actualised in every new phase of the eternalistic process.
The difference in this particular respect lies in philosophical ambitions. Establishing a metafictive without a primary fictive as a platform is unthinkable within classical philosophy, but entirely in line with eternalism. The reason is that eternalist philosophy, in contrast to totalist philosophy, does not intend to domesticate mobilistic reality. It has no intention, again in contrast to its predecessor, either to be or to achieve some ultimate, transcendental truth, but sees itself merely as an instrument subordinate to the need for eternalisation and metaphysics. Eternalism is, however, not synonymous with metaphysics, it has no need to localise thought anywhere else but to Dasein. Whenever the eternalist perception of truth seems to be on the point of bursting under the pressure of newly gained knowledge of mobilistic immanence, the doctrine is smoothly altered in the direction of the new insight. The inclusive membrane of eternalism has a surface which remains intact while the contents are in constant development, a movement which is driven by the forces which are active in the surrounding immanence.
The newly-gained creative acceptance of contradictoriness, and the resulting ability to produce metafictives without having to take a detour through primary fictives opens the way for a deeper understanding of life than was possible within the frame of the old worldview. New knowledge has come into reach, and we are forced to exchange fundamental ways of thought so that this new knowledge can be understood as meaningful. The double breakthrough of paradoxism – first within science, followed by the reformatting of philosophy and our understanding of reality – is a necessity if the continued accumulation of knowledge is to be at all possible. New knowledge reveals a new world, of which we human beings form part, which promotes new thinking if we are to understand anything about ourselves and our function in a wider context. The change is slow to start with, and partial, but it later spreads over the whole field of knowledge, at the same time as the speed of the change dramatically increases.
Hegel’s perception that the historical goal of thought as a transcendental phenomenon is to think itself as pure thought is further developed in eternalism into the belief that the understanding of the structure of thought itself is the only possible meaning of thought. The goal of thought is not a particular object, but instead the creative avoidance of the thinking of goals, a continual, balanced creation of problems. The death-wish of thought is disarmed, and is turned on itself, and is therefore transformed into a paradoxist desire for life: the paradox of metaphysics is benign, it is life-giving and forms the basis for eternalism’s ethics. Eternalism and mobilism speak of different things in different languages, and together they achieve a sort of stereophonic antiphony which can only be understood from the precise point of intersection, dancing on the slack line of the paradox. The dance is the goal and the purpose.
From an eternalist perspective, therefore, paradoxism is the creed of the innermost secret of existence, and from a mobilistic perspective it is the revelation of existence’s total lack of a core. Each is as true as the other. Thought is both open and tautological. The question answers itself and must therefore be constantly asked anew. Repetition and difference: all of our interaction with existence, the entire construction of continually new levels of eternalisations, stem from the concept of the eternal return of the same. Nothing changes, at the same time as absolutely everything changes all the time. Wherever we turn, wherever we move, we cannot imagine existence to be any different. Therefore it cannot be said to be different. This is not to say that this world is, as G. W. Leibniz claims, the best of all possible worlds. Instead it is a matter of our own thought. This thought is the best of all thinkable thoughts, because any other way of thought is quite simply unthinkable. Tautology is the word. In contrast, though, this thought can certainly be done with considerably greater intensity, a higher degree of difficulty and with greater enjoyment than we can manage today. The dance can always be developed.
As we have previously stated, affirmative nihilism will sooner or later relieve the cynical variety. The eternalist is manoeuvring out of the comfortless, masochistically enjoyable cul-de-sac of absolute nihilism. Claiming that there is no objective truth is, of course, in Hegelian terms, to affirm a highly objective truth. And not just that: this very truth is a metatruth, a truth about truth itself which renders invisible and denies the basic conditions of thought. Eternalism is philosophical discourse’s equivalent of the natural sciences’ quantum physics, or rather of the natural sciences’ enforced division into classical physics and quantum physics. Initially this seems illogical and without any connection to our sensory perceptions, but gradually, after a process of acclimatisation, it is becoming clarifying and unavoidable, necessary for an understanding which comprises the whole of our knowledge about life.
If we return to the phenomenon of light in an eternalistic context, the photon appears to be a fictive, and wavelength to be a metafictive, based on a concept of a fundamental field, without reference to an underlying fictive in the form of an imaginary point. Even if our thinking is polished by evolution in order to split the metafictive at all costs into a series of fictives, even if we would be incredibly relieved if we could see a wave-movement as an endless chain of particles and thus apparently avoid the troublesome movement itself, we no longer, thanks to the instruments offered by quantum physics and eternalism, need to devote ourselves to such conscious self-deception. We can keep the particle and the wave-movement apart, fictive and metafictive, and avoid the unhappy mixture which makes the contradictory unmanageable. Eternalist philosophy makes it possible to think what we know – at least to a considerably greater extent than before – which implies a revolution considering what we know today, not only about light. This revolution is reformatting not only thought, but also thought about thought.
Maintaining the distinction between fictive and metafictive eternalisations is of the greatest importance. Thanks to this difference between different levels in the production of fictives, there is an opening for a new, eagerly awaited rationality. All linguistic usage depends upon eternalisations, and in order to avoid the fatal mixture of fictive and metafictive eternalisations it is important to keep the distinction in mind, and to be constantly aware of which level is currently applicable. An eternalist form of linguistics will hopefully clean up the mess that classical philosophy has caused. In the same way that the natural sciences will show no tolerance towards a physicist who cannot keep the particle and wave-movement aspects of light apart, so a philosopher who cannot remain aware of the degree of eternalism and mobilism, fictive and metafictive, cannot count upon any great level of credibility after the breakthrough of eternalism.
The fact that quantum physics upsets us is connected to the fact that its findings do not coincide with the programmed pre-understanding with which we construct a cohesive worldview. We have simply never needed to think in quantum-physical ways in order to organise our survival, reproduction and production of identity. On the contrary, that would only have hindered us. But this is no longer the case. The next part of our old, learned and inhibited worldview to be blown to pieces is cosmology, the opposite of elementary particle physics, which will over the coming decades explode before our eyes. The attacks will rain down, in one area after the next, worldview and self-image alike will change beyond recognition. New conditions for survival, reproduction, and not least the production of identity will favour an entirely new form of pre-understanding. An entirely new generation of memes is waiting in the wings for its cue.
Thought is gradually opening up to an increased tolerance towards higher levels of abstraction. Perception of the conditions of spacetime and phenomena are moving towards the point of intersection between eternalism and mobilism. As a result philosophy is liberated from totalism’s obstinate attempts to subordinate mobilism to eternalism by force, as well as from absolute and one-sided mobilism’s denial of eternalism’s pretensions to reality. The result of the breakthrough of eternalist philosophy is an elevated vantage point, a sort of Nietzschean tower from which we can look out upon the paradoxical battle of contradictions. In one sense, Hegel is right in that history reaches its conclusion when he himself completes classical philosophy by identifying thought with the absolute truth about being. But because Nietzsche set thought in motion once again in all senses, history gathers new speed in several different directions. Eternalism gathers these movements together and throws them out into speeding history once again.
As a result, it is possible to transgress the narrow categories which evolution has equipped us with: the interplay between memes and genes enters an entirely new phase, which we shall return to in a later chapter. The balance of power is shifted further to the advantage of the memes and the disadvantage of the genes. We human beings are radically altering the world by thinking completely differently, and by thinking thought entirely differently. This relationship of this new metathought to thought can be compared to thought’s relationship to perception, in other words: yet another turbo-charger, even more expressed energy which is being fed back into the system, yet another radiant, eternalistic loop. Once and for all, we are leaving humanism for trans-humanism.
The new science and the new philosophy are part of a mutual non-zero-sum game of cross-pollination, where a development in one field also has an effect in the other. The boundaries of the thinkable are constantly being shifted. The eternalistic metaperspective corresponds, for instance, to how physics is abandoning the study of particles in what to us is familiar four-dimensional spacetime and instead, as in membrane theory, is beginning to observe energies and movements in an eleven-dimensional universe (including gravitation). The informationalist paradigm both facilitates and necessitates a pattern of thought in the thinner air of the level of higher abstraction, a new consciousness with a new, more flexible structure. As the boundaries are burst, every philosophical desire for purity, unity and dogmatism becomes increasingly absurd, for the simple reason that without a recognition of the parallel necessity of both eternalism and mobilism we lose the capacity to form a balanced view of life, and to say anything about its characteristics with any credibility in an informationalist context.
Eternalist thought rejects poststructuralism’s singularisation of the Body as the metaphysical foundation of philosophy, in the same way that it rejects the Cartesian fixation with the individual Subject and étatism’s fixation with transcendentalisations of the State and the People. Instead, eternalism constantly returns to the same starting point: its own understanding of the eternal return of the same. It is from this thought-out, rather than arbitrary, cosmic foundation that the eternalist social concept is formed, which should be regarded (and anyone who thinks there have already been enough abstractions can skip the rest of this sentence) as an eternalisation of a mobilisation of the eternalised process which has observed the originals and then produced the individual objects, bodies, technologies and distances which make up the phenomenon known as society.
On closer inspection an endless chain of linked movements and freezings becomes apparent, where only an eternalised metaperspective, a freezing of the whole process, can constitute the final eternalisation which forms the foundation of the process as such: the platform from which we observe and produce the phenomenon of society. If we observe the world from, for instance, an aeroplane window, the poststructuralist bodies disappear into the invisible infinitesimal, and what appears is a society in spacetime, buildings and infrastructure. This is civilisation: the mark of technology on nature, another order. Society is, in short, an eternalisation of the same scale as the body, albeit on a different level. Eternalism’s socioanalysis, the mapping of the collective unconscious, should be regarded as the equivalent of psychoanalysis on this other level.
This society is neither more nor less fundamental than, for instance, a human body. The question of whether we use society or the body as the basis is only a matter of where we place our vantage point. Eternalist philosophy therefore brutally dismisses all modernist and postmodern ideas that a worldview must necessarily be based upon a specific phenomenon – a body, a subject or a society – as its metaphysical starting point, because every such starting point rapidly loses its credibility thanks to its fixation on one of an infinite number of imaginable perspectives. Instead, eternalist philosophy stems from the conditions for the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism, and these conditions have nothing whatsoever to do with anything outside thought itself, and have, therefore, no connection to any physical reality either. The capitalist paradigm’s belief that a fixation upon a particular phenomenon is ideologically necessary seems, in the light of this insight, to be merely a shining example of the muddle of thought that all confusion of eternalism and mobilism leads to.
Within the frame of the paradoxist dialectic we can, in principle, deal with and arrange any number of different perspectives. Therefore it is becoming clear how absurd it is to claim that society does not exist, as in postmodern discourse, or that the collective cannot be said to exist, like the libertarians. In that case, nothing exists, and we will simply be forced to revise our vocabulary. This is just as absurd as saying that there is either a pile of pine-needles, or ants, without seeing the actual ants’ nest. Absurdities of this sort are a direct consequence of the inability to separate eternalism and mobilism, and of the inability to realise that language necessarily exists within the eternalistic sphere. Thus eternalism sweeps away a number of old problems, which are basically only a matter of conceptual confusion. At the same time, it is only after this sweep has been done that the possibility emerges for an ideology which sees society as an organism and prioritises the construction of positive feedback loops, in other words: the interests which arise from the relations between phenomena, rather that the specific interests within the phenomena themselves.
The most severe consequence of the dialectic between eternalism and mobilism is that the process of thought can itself never be rational. This is because enormous voids appear between the various fictives, separating them in spacetime, and these voids expand, because they too are in motion in relation to motion. And because the illusion of stability and totality is a necessary precondition of thought, these voids must be continually filled in by the creative imagination of the observer. This creative imagination has an absolutely decisive function in the eternalist model, which can therefore not co-exist with rationalism. The eternalist view of thought is therefore that thought must ultimately be seen as reactive towards its surroundings, and as guesswork, rather than self-sufficient and rational. This means that if eternalist philosophy wants to establish itself properly, it must put the classical axioms of rationalism aside, and regard itself as a sort of meteorology of knowledge, rather than a classic self-deceiving science.
Both spacetime itself and the phenomenon within spacetime are categories which form part of our genetic inheritance. They have become part of our inheritance because they have proved to be extremely useful and beneficial to the survival of our genes, and they therefore do not require learning. Imagination produces totality by filling the voids between the fictives in accordance with our pre-programming, and the results are rapidly adjusted to fit the surrounding collective’s production of totality and new incoming data. Upon closer inspection, the process consists of perception and thought constantly presenting, like weather-forecasters on television, a series of more or less well-founded prognoses of the state of things, and these being constantly modified through feedback. This is the meteorology of knowledge, an eternal construction and reconstruction of provisional views of reality. And this flow of fictives is fictivised on a higher level to become a metafictive in the form of a fixed worldview which we preserve and defend to the point where no renovation process in the world can save it, because incoming data can no longer be blended into the totality, which as a result is ready to collapse at any moment. The alternative, then, is either suppression and psychosis, or a shift to an entirely different worldview. The former often precedes the latter. The entire process is known as a paradigm shift.
The need for suppression, or alternatively a total shift, only arises when continuous revision is no longer enough, which strictly speaking means that reflection can be regarded as an endless series of paradigm shifts, albeit microscopic and limited to the individual subject. A paradigm shift on the scale that interests us in this context is, however, both a collective and an individual occurrence, the transition of an entire society from one common, all-encompassing worldview to a completely different one. This is not something which anyone does voluntarily or for the sake of it: it is a turbulent process which changes the ecology of an entire society fundamentally, and therefore forces the collective to orientate itself according to completely new points of reference. Some groups are favoured at the expense of others, entirely new power structures develop, concepts like status and success acquire entirely new meanings and are manifested in entirely new ways.
The eternalist view of history recognises only four paradigm shifts on this scale, all linked to a defining breakthrough in information technology: spoken language, written language, the printing press, and electronic interactivity (for a more detailed discussion of this point, see the first chapter of Netocracy). With the appearance of spoken language, human beings literally became human beings, because the development of the organs of speech coincided with the appearance of homo sapiens; with the development of written language, human beings settled down and formed more cohesive societies; with the printing press, human beings became urbanised and industrialised; and with electronic interactivity human beings are becoming globalised. These paradigm shifts can naturally not be objectively true from any other point of view but the eternalist – the metahistorical truth about truth is that we always write history within the frame of a worldview, and that anything else is impossible – but no other point of view than the eternalist one is, on the other hand, credible and relevant as an informational society’s producer of truth.
In order to understand social relations we must first understand what we call the subject, and the basis of the subject is not merely paradoxist, but also ironic. The fact that thought ultimately always rests upon fictives such as the point and the now, and that the totality of the worldview is always highly illusory, clearly shows the central role illusion plays in our lives. The subject must experience the world as a totality in order to experience itself as a totality, otherwise there would be no boundary at all between the world and the subject, and consequently no subject. Lacan, inspired by Hegel, demonstrates precisely this point: how the subject has to think of itself as a totality in order to be able to think itself at all, while at the same time that same subject, from a mobilistic perspective, for instance when regarded by other subjects, can only appear as an echoing void. This is the ironic and paradoxist basis of the subject. In part we have an eternalist subject which must be filled with substance, and in part a mobilist subject which is a pure effort of will, a gesture with no content. Both are true, but in different senses. They contradict one another, at the same time as they come together in the paradoxist subject.
Within this irony there is a deeper one. Every substance which the subject, during its continuous introspection, imagines itself to find embedded in its own essence, has to be cleaned out in order to maintain the illusion, and therefore keep the subject itself alive. The substance-filled ego constantly empties itself in order to be able to refill itself again. The project can never be completed, because that would be the same as the death of the project, and therefore the subject. It is this internal archaeological excavation, complemented by a methodical demonstration of all findings, which characterises self-consciousness and the almost enforced nurturing of the ego. The subject is, thus, a walled, strictly guarded and minutely illuminated void, whose emptiness must always be concealed and at the same time defended. The death-wish is a continual nagging desire to surrender to the pressure of the surrounding world, to tear down the wall and let oneself be filled up by the formless torrent. The problem here is that the subject would be extinguished in the process. The death-wish on an individual level can, in other words, be said to be the individual unconscious’s desire to be filled up by and dissolve into the collective unconscious.
On the one hand: the subject’s hard-won eternalistic self-image in the form of a container full to the brim of non-world. On the other hand: an indifferently amazed, mobilistic reverse image of the same subject in the form of a vacuum-pack with no content at all. The result is a glaring discrepancy, a vast abyss which the subject in its dealings with the surrounding world seeks to bridge. The fact that the subject only arises and survives in its very struggle to convince the mobilistic surrounding world – full of other eternalist subjects – of its own unique status as subject, is the fundamental fact upon which all social relationships are built. As a result, it is also the starting point for all eternalist sociology.
The only recognition of the subject’s substantiality which is at all possible is the subject’s recognition of itself, because no other subject can comprehend the existence of any other such substance. This results in a continually recurring and painful lack of recognition, a deficit of identity which the subject tries to remedy by confusedly seeking both psychic and social recognition, a lack which therefore constitutes the very engine of the desire for life. The enforced compromise between the continually unsatisfied subject and the collective – whose existence is naturally dependent upon the existence of the subject; it is enough to state that suicide is an almost universal taboo: at the same time as the collective stands or falls upon the continued maintenance of an identity deficit, because this keeps the subject in the role of its loyal slave – consists of the subject hiding behind a symbolic façade which the partners in the social game have agreed to recognise against the promise that no-one will touch the apparently insoluble, underlying conflict. This symbolic façade is the name, and the effect of the façade is strengthened by the genetically motivated tendency to project the dream of recognition onto the human face. The appearance and survival of the subject can therefore, admittedly, be seen as a form of unconscious voodoo, but the arrangement has worked splendidly for many thousands of years.
Eternalist thought, therefore – unlike all the various variants of capitalist ideology – does not start from either the subject or the body, nor even – unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger and the poststructuralists – from the illusion of the body. The starting point for eternalism is instead the paradoxist illusion itself, both the individual and collective variants. The set of conditions is universally valid, because the paradox of metaphysics is not a phenomenon which restricts itself merely to our human thought, but something which must be built into every imaginable thought, simply because the relationship between thought and existence cannot be imagined any other way. Every form of consciousness must by definition circle around a core of paradoxist illusion, this is the formally eternal but, in terms of content, constantly changing truth about the subject.
As a result of this insight, humanism is definitively consigned to a newly-dug grave. But the burial plot alongside is reserved for the extreme relativism of late-capitalism, in other words: the anti-humanism which started with Kant and was completed by Jacques Derrida and his many adherents, tripped out on melancholy. Just as atheists practice an inverted form of religion, anti-humanists are no better than embittered and frustrated humanists whose position is entirely determined by what they deny. Eternalism is therefore not reactive and anti-humanist, but active and post-humanist. It sweeps up, cleans out, and moves on. It claims universal validity precisely because the very oscillation between two parallel, fundamentally different but, at the same time, mutually dependent systems is not only acceptable, but absolutely fundamental. As a result, existence as chaos is reconciled to thought in fictive totalities. The synthesis, which is and must be given in advance, reveals both components of the process: the eternalism whose ultimate truth is the greatest lie of mobilism, and vice versa. And they are indissolubly united in the eternal dialectic dance.
According to Lacan, the subject’s experience of itself, its self-consciousness, is a process which starts at the moment the original experience of total harmony between the point in space and the now in time is broken and the subject’s lack of substance becomes unavoidable. The metaphysical desire which thereafter characterises the subject can be seen as a desire for a healing of this original wound, this shocking disappointment, and therefore as a desire to form part of something else, something larger. Naturally, this is ultimately a longing for extinction, comparable to the Freudian death-wish or the Buddhist desire for the extinguishing of Nirvana.
The path to extinction is edged with other subjects who offer the same temptation, difficult to resist. The mutual death-wish of the subjects attracts them to one another. The result is a desire for symbiosis, a longing for ultimate submission, total domestication, and this is a fundamental driving force in all forms of social relationship. By combining, the subjects hope to avoid their fundamental existential loneliness. If it were not for the fact that the hermit-instinct – which stems from the subject’s longing for recognition, both its own possible and the collective’s impossible recognition – encourages the opposite desire in the subject, to transgress domestication and maintain an absolute boundary against the outside world – only that which still exists can demand and enjoy recognition – then the desire for symbiosis would dissolve all social dynamics and society would implode. The paradoxist subject therefore gains its energy from the internal power-struggle between the desire for symbiosis and the hermit-instinct. The oscillating but maintained balance between these two desires is the very precondition for the existence of the subject.
The paradoxist process of subjectification means that the subject arises from the very contradiction between mobilism’s demand that the subject be an illusion (the subject confronting the death-wish), and eternalism’s demand that the subject be a metaphysical basis (the subject confronting the desire for life). The subject is consequently a phantasmagoria floating in the field of tension between these two fictives. What the ego does not know about itself it has to imagine with the help of the meteorology of knowledge. This is the paradox of metaphysics of the subject level. In the mobilist sphere, metaphysics are an impossibility, but within the eternalist sphere they are a necessity. Without this paradoxity we cannot imagine ourselves as thinking beings. Existence is, when we come to think of it, fundamentally paradoxist.
The life of a human being can seem like an endless series of vain attempts to dissolve the paradox which is the very precondition of life, which adds yet another paradoxist and ironic dimension. It is these eternal, tragically fruitless efforts which Nietzsche praises in his ethics by using the word Versuch. Every Versuch is with devastating probability doomed to fail, but one can never be entirely certain; the failure is not predetermined by fate or inscribed in any law. Therefore human beings must act out every Versuch with maximum effort – like a conscious protest of the desire for life against, and therefore also a reckoning with, its origins in the death-wish – in spite of all previous failures. This is Nietzsche’s tragic ethics, the love of fate: amor fati. Consequently it is also the starting point for the whole of mobilistic thought, which, via Freud and psychoanalysis, has been further developed and partially restored to philosophy by thinkers like Bataille and Lacan.
In a mobilistic sense we cannot really speak of a subject at all. But what we can speak of is a process, a series of impulses, whose starting point is the mobilistic origin of the subject. Lacan attributes this origin to the early separation of the child’s body from that of its mother. This is, to borrow a metaphor from physics, the big bang of the ego. The origin of the ego is infinitesimal and must be presupposed by eternalism, even if in a mobilistic sense it can never be tied to any specific now. This singularity, this fictive moment of birth of the subject, is actually from a mobilistic point of view merely a continuous, flat chain of actuality, a field of events rather than one particular event.
This singularity is developed, when seen as a process, with infinite speed. As a result, a countless number of potential subject processes die every imaginable moment: all the possibilities which are not actualised, and all the countless consequences which in turn stem from these. A veritable genocide of unborn subjects takes place in every now. Only a single subject process lives on, is singularised and immediately splits into an endless number of potential subject processes, of which all but one are exterminated in the next imaginable moment, upon which this single actualised survivor forms the starting point for the next link in the further development of the chain. And so on, ad infinitum.
The innumerable mass of variables and the high degree of chance in this process mean that the chain’s development and its necessity can only be determined with hindsight. If we in our thoughts summarise this chain and see it as a single continuum which imagines itself, we have created an eternalistic subject. But it has, as we have said, a constantly evasive twin. We cannot observe the mobilistic subject process when we have the eternalistic subject in front of our eyes. We cannot observe the mobilistic subject at all, because its only defining feature is its emptiness, which is why all that is left is a striking absence. Both of these subjects are true in their correct context, and only there, and together they constitute the paradoxist subject which demonstrates entirely different characteristics from different angles. This means that the question of the subject’s existence or non-existence must, in eternalist philosophy, be answered with ‘both’.
It is extremely illuminating to see the subjectification process as analogous to the universe’s development in time, which in a mobilistic sense has been a development of an endless number of potential universes, of which only a thin thread of actualities has wound its way through the narrow passage of imagined moments. The immanence is an endless sea of potentialities, where a single small island of actuality flickers for a moment before immediately fading and being replaced by a new one, which also immediately fades, and so on. This sea is a bottomless grave for countless possibilities, which would be truly tragic if that thin thread of actualities were not itself the bearer of countless possibilities. The universe is in this sense itself an infinite magnitude, at every imagined moment.
Consciousness cannot imagine either the infinite, nor the infinitesimal in which the origins of everything are lost. If this were the case, if consciousness really could get a grasp of the infinite and the infinitesimal, consciousness would grow rigid and cease all activity, it would fade and be extinguished. The totality would be real, everything in infinity would have its equivalent in thought, the creative function of the imagination would be abolished, the meteorology of knowledge would itself have no purpose. As a result, the thinking subject would also dissolve, be discharged because of a lack of work. The inaccurate correspondence between thought and being is thus itself the deficiency which makes thought, and therefore life itself, possible. Both existence and thought have to take place within the finite in order to exist.
Eternalist epistemology can be summarised by saying that the amount of information is always impossible to grasp, no matter how limited the perspective may be. And, contrary to what rationalism claims, information is always running away from us. However hard we attempt to grasp it, it will always run through our fingers like sand, because the amount of information which is produced always greatly exceeds the amount of information which we – or any other imaginable divine being, for that matter – might possibly be thought to handle. But in contract to what rationalism claims, this is actually a blessing. There is no chance of managing without the meteorology of knowledge, the compass, based upon a provisional set of paradoxes, which ultimately keeps our illusory thought in motion and our double subject alive.
Those who deny that God is dead often claim that God is not only extremely alive, but that he is also all-seeing and all-knowing. This is, in actual fact, the definition of God’s being. But if God knows everything, then he is guaranteed to be dead. And of course he would have realised this himself, if he really does know everything. Life is, instead, the art of getting a small portion of confused and tragic information, and a large dose of creative and comic imagination to collaborate with one another in a constantly surprising piece of theatre, performed against the ungraspable and indifferent backdrop of mobilistic reality. Faith in the divine or the supernatural is, in the light of this beautiful insight, no more than a poorly concealed fear or hatred of life itself. If we want to love instead of hate, we must therefore constantly remind ourselves that we are in the state which Heidegger calls Dasein, and nowhere else; there is nothing divine, nothing supernatural, only the human, the all too human. But one can love that, and one can love that together with other people, precisely because it actually exists.