'I Have No Idea Whats Going On'

'I Have No Idea Whats Going On'.

You know, if we stopped capitalism tomorrow—a hypothetical at best—the process of extinction would only accelerate. It’s not really remarkable anymore that whole communities are built on this lie i.e. that since we cannot survive capitalism, we had better destroy capitalism. In fact, there is no form of Marxism, however radical or reformulated, that escapes this logical perfidy. Just as the big bang at the supposed origin of the universe produced a noise which has yet to reach us, so today we are operating on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from the 1980s. Moreover, since that time we have emitted the same amount as in the previous 236 years. If you take a moment to put that together and add the stellar carbon lag, the facts are astronomical. It’s really very simple. Because of all this, and much more, I have no more understanding of anything or interest in what anyone is doing. I feel sick. It is as if there were a more-than-virus and precisely that is the virus. I have no understanding of anything. I categorically have no more understanding of anything. I don’t understand what you are doing. I have no idea what’s going on.

Our earth is not superhabitable.¹ It is not even close. We happen to have come to exactly the sort of earth that cannot sustain life for much longer. Humanity as it has come to be, on this particular earth, is unsustainable by definition. People often say that the earth will be fine, it’s just we who will not survive. It seems like this is not the case. It is quite easy for the earth’s atmosphere to be ruptured for good, beyond repair, for example by multiple nuclear meltdowns triggered by co-extinction events. We are now almost inevitably going to do that. This will take things far beyond the previous six so-called mass extinction events into what might be thought of as meta-extinction. Since this won’t be an event ‘for us’, it won’t have taken us anywhere.² It won’t form an ‘idea’. It will not compute. It has not computed.

Even the most accurate work in the field of extinction theory is full of lies. Thomas Moynihan’s X-Risk, for example, goes to great lengths to attain a new concept of Extinction and to argue that this concept qua Concept occurs to us now for the first time. But Moynihan straightaway relapses into believing that some kind of bio-conceptual intervention can at least mitigate the time that remains. Such mitigations are already known only to accelerate, and precisely because of the structure of the problem. I have no interest in publishing an academic paper on how Moynihan is bullshitting. The simple fact is I have no idea what such a person is doing writing such a book. It goes all the way and then stops just at the point of having to think what it actually thinks. It doesn’t think at all. It’s a lie.

I don’t understand what anyone is doing. I have no idea what’s going on. What they do is they do and I just don’t understand it, this doing. I don’t understand my own doing, given where we are. Why am I doing? What is it? What do you want from me? There is, and here is our proof, no doing, and no business doing. When soph says on Twitter on 4 March 2021, ‘i have no idea whats going on’, we can take her more seriously than we expect, more seriously than any philosopher or rapper-philosopher. The new type of e-girl is not dumb, they never have been. She thinks purely. She concludes, ‘i have no idea whats going on’. This is the only pure thinking I know.

This ‘i have no idea whats going on’ is more true than anything Stiegler, a supposedly great philosopher, said to us. Stiegler was psychotic in insisting that our beautiful world can be saved when it cannot be. In effect, any movement or gesture apart from ‘i have no idea whats going on’ is psychotic. You may say that this is what the human is, the psychotic, the necessity of the lie, and so on, etc. That the psyche is only produced as a healthy, psychotic cleft, as the good sense of lying. But of course, I would say, do you think I don’t already understand this and don’t already live it? How could I live at all, if I did not sometimes give in and sleep, and lie? So why say that at all? Why not simply say, ‘i have no idea whats going on’?

Everyone in history is reduced to this simple moment. You want there to be a good sense and a tenderness of the lie, but as soon as you say so, you have doubled the lie and let me know what it is and just how real it is. Maybe I don’t find that tender at all. I don’t see where your tenderness is, unless it can extend to this blankness. We must lie, I hear you say, yes, yes, yes, of course, but you just told me again what the lie is. Everyone in history is here, psychotically listening. If you move away from this point of concentration, you can live for a while, sure, but you will come back, wounded, again here. This is all Claire and Justine discuss in Melancholia. This is all Ismene and Antigone discuss at the start of Antigone:

Ismene.—
If things have reached this stage, what can I do,
poor sister, that will help to make or mend?
Antigone.—
Think will you share my labour or my act.

Right from the start here, everyone is lying. Ismene is no longer able—already—to offer help to the place where Antigone is going, and Antigone will pretend (to be pretending) to believe that there is still time in which Ismene can join in with her task. Notice how Ismene says ‘if’. But it is not a matter of if things have reached ‘that stage’. Instead, they have. And yet, the offer of help is there. What help? What help could possibly be given? Why not simply repeat what I say rather than refuse it in attempting to block out time? Antigone is committed to her task, regardless of its content, and that is the that of that. Sometimes the only offer of help can be and should be a silent one; not a refusal, but a faithful not knowing what I am or how I could say anything in reply. In fact, is not all help of every conventional kind ultimately an absence of love? Here is how Bion describes how everything gets like this:

Such a nonexistent object can be so terrifying that its ‘existence’ is denied, leaving only the ‘place where it was’. This does not solve the problem because the place where it was, the no-thing, is even more terrifying because it has, as it were, been further denied existence instead of being allowed to glut itself with any existence it has been able enviously to find. Denial of the existence of the ‘place where it was’ only makes matters worse because now the ‘point’, marking the position of the no-thing, cannot be located.

This is, among so much else, a description of the opening scene of Antigone, which Bion does not mention of course, and a description of the innate frustration on every side of advice-giving or help-offering. Innocent lying is all well and good, but it it is also ‘simply leaving only the “place where it was”’. In fact, the implication of the good and attuned lie is always, ‘I get to lie, so that you don’t’, or, ‘you are the one who will pay for the lie I live by’, or, ‘I will help you so that you no longer bother me’. By saying anything other than ‘i have no idea whats going on’, we not only lie, but leave the place of nonexistence cursed, warped, created, doubled. This is not to say that we should, or can, tell the truth.

When Antigone says to her sister,

Think will you share my labour or my act.

what is she doing or saying? Perhaps nothing. Do we really think Antigone’s is a labour that could be shared or that Ismene could ever be in a position to share it, except when too late? It’s already too late; that is why Antigone is asking her, and asking her to think. And first of all, she really is asking her to think. Perhaps there is nothing more cruel than giving advice at the end of time, when the cone of the anthropic and the near-multiversal appear to coincide; but first of all the advice takes the form of pretending it is not the end of time. Antigone is ‘poor sister’, to be pitied, even though she has yet to tell her sister what the act is. The form of the lie is, recall, ‘the earth will be fine—just without us’. Within this lie, we are psychotics, without it there is nothing but the ravages of beautified collapse.

Antigone.—
I wouldn’t urge it. And if now you wished
to act, you wouldn’t please me as a partner.
Be what you want to, but that man shall I
bury. For me, the doer, death is best.

I have no idea what we are doing. But I would have no idea how to ask you how you could leave me alone like this, to be the one who said these things. From the start of life it is too late. Antigone’s task is not joinable by any Ismene—it is without mimesis—and not because Antigone is uniquely capable, but because by the time she has conceived it, nobody else can conceive it. I wouldn’t ask you for this help now even if you could give it to me. I don’t know what it would have been anyway. Antigone makes her decision in the place of the plasticity of death. Let us claim that Lacan is wrong to say that in doing so she ‘buys the death drive’, since she decided in the place of the death drive, and not in its name. Eventually Ismene does come around, and wants to follow the act. But by definition, this is something she cannot do even if she does.

Antigone.—
If that’s your saying, I shall hate you first,
and next the dead will hate you in all justice.

Extremely new here is not that a sister should hate her sister, but that she should do so on this exclusive condition: if you will not take on the cause of the dead with me (translation: the future perfect extinct), then you yourself will be hated by them. You will be hated, that is, by the future extinct. You will be hated in and by all the justice of the future extinct. The extinct will hate you. They will hate you in all justice. I will hate you, in them, and for them. This is what Antigone was always saying. This is why she was buried alive. This was her extended curse.

Is this too much? Why address this here to ‘you’, save that my ‘you’ is your ‘you’ and this wave of aggression a secret that can always be told? The curse of the future extinct is the curse of everybody. There is nobody today who is not full of or at least touched by at an obscure depth this hatred in this extreme way, and in this extreme way they are made extreme. And if there is a unilateral extremity of hatred, then this is where it comes from. Its economy is severe. We have seen nothing yet in terms of how the hatred and the madness of the extinct will unfold.

1. On the inner edge of the safety zone, and within less than 1% of inhabitability, we are a solar indecision, sheer chance. ‘If you are this close to the inner edge of the habitable zone, it is not as difficult to push yourself over . . . and that is catastrophic.’

2. Once we go, all does—as far as we will have time to tell.