ON ANGELIC MATERIALISM

The human psyche is set up to exclude the possibility of its own removal. What cognition can never get even when the words are said is that we may sometime soon never be here again. The idea of consciousness as an unintended exception is by definition so mind-bending as to be inadmissible. This is because even an artificial version of the anthropic would have to begin by guarding against the perception of its not being there. To never be here ever again, to be here only this once: this would be to see the universe as entirely, unbearably, angelically material.

In-built occlusion and relapse define the human itself. No amount of avowal or artificial intellectualization can outflank these defaults forever. The introduction of extinction qua extinction into the heart of culture, turning culture into aculture, is in this sense the last most beautiful decay. The angelically plaited materialist presents the gap between how it is and how it is remembered as acultural immanent heaven. Scotomatic duration neglect is itself properly stunning. No elegiac cinema can match this gap; no formal lack of pathos fit it.

Self-suppressed, the psyche encounters extinction qua extinction as apsychic possibility, one it never gets over. It sleeps, forgets, and then begins again. But the implied repetition means that universal extinction as a mode extends itself, that is, figuratively resurrects. Iterations of ideas are how culture evolves. Skim-read the end of Cixin Liu’s Death’s End and see what this means: there, all laws of physics have been weaponized, including mathematics, and the human means merely the donation of remaining time to extinction computation. But this is just absolute science fiction.