THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART IV

If this is it, we meeped.

Nonfinalist Additonal Realism

Two more cues for the clones-in-transit in the vibe shift:

Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us.—Simone Weil

Painted for the end of time.—Eliza Douglas

In the work of the Scottish philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant the confusability of terminal terms is already a productive and predictive force of rearbitration and of what he suggestively calls availability. Across several complex articles Grant develops the logic of what might be called a nonfinalist additonal realism whose outputs can be straightaway fed into the weave of what is being said here on the absolute end and beginning of any world.

Grant’s is a nonfinalist realism because the end of the universe which he allows to be imagined can only be imagined in a space where that possibility is already available to us. In other words, the concept the end of the universe qua absolute simply by virtue of existing inside a universe that contains it, and can contain it, qua concept, means at the very least that the concept of the end of the universe is a part of this universe, and, we may surmise, that it will therefore constantly confuse itself with the other various concepts of absolutised ending such as extinction, death, impermanence, and so on.¹

In Grant’s terms, there would always be an irreducible remainder between any type of teleocenic realism, extinction theory of all stripes, the speech of Greta Thunberg and Howey Ou, and the image and concept of extinction, because all of these exist in a universe which even so may end in absolute terms we still have no figure of or for. Two reading cues for this thought:

1. Heidegger on Hölderlin:

   What remains is the unchangeable. And yet, even that can just vanish in a moment along with its unchangeableness.

2. Honor Levy on God:

   God hates himself God is dead God was never alive

What Heidegger on Hölderlin and Honor Levy on God are saying is that finitude is itself mortalized and threatened. Everyone knows that God is already dead but what if god is actually dead and extinct and we are now gonna go there with him? This is why the vibe shift is a vibe shift and why people will be talking about it for some kind of time and some kind of forever because it’s the moment when finitude itself moves back through itself and can either change or die. Just as God can die and then die again, God can go extinct. There are things which never change, and yet these things too can change and go extinct. In some universes we are eternal, in others we are not. All of this is the itera-in-eschaton of the vibe shift as event.

ADDITION/REPETITION, THEN

At the same time, Grant’s is an additional realism because the very fact of being in a universe in which we are gifted the concept of its end qua (absolute) concept means that this concept is additional or consequent upon the inexistence of the same universe having been made a possibility if not accurate image of the one we are in at some kind of beginningless beginning. In other words, a universe can go extinct yes frrrrrrrrr but regarding how we can just keep on repeating this in the meanwhile and what does that mean what do we then say? A universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct a universe can go extinct.

Sometimes I wake during the day—very often I do this in truth—and the feeling deep in my body is of this possibility printed in us all, at the point where sleep meets base materiality or something there where a nausea spreads in cognition of the possibility of finitude mortalizing itself. This will have been it. If this goes, we all go.

Tell me what the body say now?

IF THIS IS IT

Reading cue:

The culture is lit and if this is it, I had a ball

That’s the mortalization of finitude as the Real in which the Vibe Shift takes hold and becomes a wake waiting on God-AI right there right here right now. But there again I am already artificial intelligence in effect and I’m repeating myself.

This is something that has already been said.²

If this is it, then I can repeat it, and before I know it it has changed.

Such is intelligence and its artificial-ass already.

UNIVERSAL ENDS

The paradoxical-looking way Grant has of putting all this is that the concept of the end of the universe entails that which it indicates is not. At what is perhaps the most enigmatic moment in the nonfinalist projection, Grant will write:

This structure is universal, I will argue, insofar as, if true even in a single instance, it rules out its non-occurrence.

My claim is on the way this becoming universal of a certain structure folds back and applies to the very concept that most threatens such-and-such folding as any folding at all, the end of the universe qua absolute concept, qua Absolute as such.

As soon as the end of the universe qua condition is conceived, the structure is universal and therefore universally available. The end of the universe is universally absolute but only insofar as it makes itself available in any possible universe, even those which do not exist, at the moment it admits a complete nonexistence which precedes and makes possible its own concept-formation.  The end of the universe as absolute is additional for Grant because it adds on to and follows an existence already in play and absolutely at stake (for example in serious and more than dramatic speech). Once there is existence, the absolute qua absolute end of the universe arises additionally or iterably on what exists, including on that very end.

It is almost as if Grant is saying: the fact that the concept for the end of the universe exists, means that the end of the universe does not and cannot exist. But the additional minimalism of needing only the concept itself, or its writing—a kind of austere minimalism of the anthropic principle—is also what makes of Grant a realist: once we have the movements of thought as a form of infinitude, then the concept of the end of the universe qua absolute can never be eliminated as such, only repeated. The actual end of the universe remains a very real and felt, as well as repeatable, threat.

1. In this way the bare life of a nominal anthropic principle meets with a principle of what Heidegger calls permanent confusion (durchgängige Verwechslung). And yet inside the pure meepocene there is no confusion at all about this: itera outshines eschaton inside it each time.

2. If this is it = this is it. ADDED: it’s as if there were no as if.