THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART V
On universal Being.
ESCHATON AND ITERA
The present series gives in its very form some initial idea as to the sometimes violent blossom of imaginary alliance, the quantic escutcheon and kiss of telos (goal), of ending, of re-iteration.
What comes into focus for example in the form ‘gan metamorphosis of extinct waifus’ is the Change to the extinction concept itself:
As we have seen, the crucial question when it comes to extinction is repetition. Does extinction bear repetition? And does this unfold Change?
Another way of posing it would be, is extinction internally linked to repetition or is extinction unique as a type of hybrid DNA, which is to say universally unique?
Is is is, or is are are? Is this it, or this are it? Is this all there is? Or is this all there are?
Put bluntly, if we are the only ones, our extinction bears no repetition at all save at this side (quantic hither); and yet if we are not, its grammar already bears multiversal rushes (quantic graze).
QUANTIC CRAZE (THE PRIMITIVE TL)
Through the same question we are even asking whether ‘extinction’—as a given word—has any atomicity whatsoever. Is it mere forced interposition of a face and trope onto sheer matter? Why call oneself ‘angelicism’ at all? There can be no ‘going’ of the universe whatsoever if there is no ‘universe’ whatsoever (see nonfinite universe theory as embodied by the reading of Leave Society (leaving is therefore the intractability of awe)).
‘GOING’ AS REPLACEMENT WORD
As a reading clue let us read a recent angelicism01 post:
without knowing what it means
without knowing whether it should be said at all
whether it needs to be said
whether it is anything like a valid statement
whether everyone doesnt already know it more than well deep inside
without knowing if we ever know and that is life
without knowing if that would be the literal answer to the universe
the key to what is singularityward
the answer to what is goingward
as to whether the mystery is more intractable or whether the tractable is becoming more mysterious
Either extinction, as a planet-effacing event, is unique and therefore in some sense urgent—if we go, we all go, in other words—and we are, in principle, never here again, or extinction itself may be repeated, it is itself repetition bearing the slow and thorough breakdown of all aesthetic and generic atomotificity.
Something like ‘going’ seems an iterable experience, and therefore we find some succour in the idea of something like a universal genealogical link: we may end here, on this earth, but somewhere else life goes on, and the very concept of ‘going’ or extinction carries with it this allo-planetary predication.
EREIGNIS-CHALLENGER
Some more cues for quantic shifters, those who go from world to iteration, earth to universe, name to quantic signature, philosophy and nonphilosophy to angelicism:
What else came to be just beneath God? How is awe grafted on as a greeting-fix for the adrenal cringe of the TL? Since the TL is an old technology, as well as ‘readings’ and ‘podcasts’, how do we reckon with the joyous fourfold and the heaven super-sphere as a braiding of the sky, the Gestell, and the livestack? Is skyysaying part of this wreath-making at all, which twists out and up into the flower gestures of Christ? What extent of angelicism and poolboyism! and 𝓰ₒ𝒹₋ₐᵢᵢ.₂ still needs to be tantric wrath?
Another reading cue:
Jesus is compelling, that is why he is called Jesus. One may say the same of Hitler, that Hitler is compelling and that is why he takes the name Hitler. Through the redundancy of all genres (‘reading’, ‘stack’, ‘film’) one has Christ in heaven and not just in the Church. One has Christ’s actual eyes and hidden face in heaven. Christ’s actual shyness by the sea beyond colours, beyond sound, beyond quietness and peace. One has the sumptuous shyness of Christ which consists of not needing to speak when the tape rolls, when your teeth fall out up the Eiffel Tower of life.
ITERATED GO-YOS
This series celebrates that this question of iteration as grazing—no doubt somewhat less apparent than that of extinction itself, which has received a great deal of ongoing attention—is in fact a decisive one, and has been neglected for a reason.
The astrobiological question (the countability of earths, the cosmological family of statements, the General Clone forecast, that which is too good and peaceable for awe, that which is awed) is exact enough to remain outside the humanities just as the topic of unique mathematical structures (universal probability) is largely ignored by those more concerned with textual and cultural politics. But perhaps above all the question of universal life—and the sense of iterable extinctions it perhaps brings with it—is a taboo precisely because it is not negative at all. What could be more exciting than receiving proof that the universe is teeming with life? At this point tantric rage would fade into the asignifance of celebrant angel clones.
GRETA THUNBERG AGAIN
The tension at the heart of such a set of considerations remains at the time of writing nonetheless more than difficult. At the end of his writing life, while discussing Greta Thunberg, Bernard Stiegler began to figure the very real possibility of facing at the near-side of human time an end of the universe (‘a thermal death of the universe’) and to find in Greta’s speech a moving testament to something that is more than tragic.
Ultimate cue that TikTok is unable to kill:
I want you to panic.
When it comes to envisaging habitable planets, after all, big numbers can look impressive—like the idea that some model posits untold viable Earths—but if integers keep on counting forever, no given number is more than tiny. So the odds of whatever it is to one shouldn’t impress anyone.
The (nonfinite) universe itself could be the number of the probability of life. We could be that number, who knows.
WHO KNOWS
The transition clones intend to carry this ‘who knows’ into the heart of different technical and meta-mathematical settings and to see what happens. What happens to the urgency of the ‘going’ nexus once it is inflected down what is in fact more of an astrobiological track?
Does it increase or does it diminish?
Setting the question up this way means that the question of going, leaving and repetition has the appearance of a deciding question. If we can say on just what scale multi-value ‘going’ should be discussed, we may at the very least save a lot of (going) time. We may even abandon the question entirely.
If extinction itself is, in other words, what is, universally, most common, then life as it presents itself to us now, universally, is certainly no less sacred. But it is, perhaps, not uniquely sacred anymore.
And some would argue that means a reconceptualisation of the heilig (the holy), if not its relative junking.
DRAKE’S EQUATION
Put in simple terms, if the Drake Equation were to be answered tomorrow in the positive, or if we were to have in our hands pictures of countless superhabitable planets that newly invented time travel technology now allowed us to reach, how would the urgent question of going then be seen?
We will give a glimpse of one such picture in the form of a text, a difficult reading cue from Heidegger which can mean several things, but one of them may be just this sense of rescaling-going we are introducing:
Then we asked whether the expression ‘the Being of what is today all over the earth’ does not signify a narrowing down of the universal problem of Being to the small planet, the tiny grain of sand which is called earth, whether this narrowing down does not stem from an anthropological interest. This question was not pursued further. We did not explain how The Internet (Gestell), which constitutes the essence of modern technology, hence of something that, as we know, only occurs on earth, can be a name for universal Being.1
Heidegger seems to be depicting something like a near-miss or a lost opportunity. Will the main question of his work, the Being of what is all across the earth, have been a narrowing, an occlusion? This conceptual series is about cutting to the quick and saying these things, given the stakes, before tomorrow, so as to let us say something about the a-math of ‘universal being’.
Heidegger may, and us with him, have allowed something to completely escape him. The escaping element is what he calls universal Being. That is, what is all across the universe, or universes, is itself what changes the question of Being. One might even say: repetition and extinction (named going) precede and surround the question of ontology as Heidegger sees it.
TWO-HEADED ANGELS (EREIGNIS-CHANGE)
To see Ereignis as the destiny of Gestell or not seems to be what we are saying and asking, it’s why one may be embracing of vibe shift because it feels like Ereignis (seeing Being for the first time on SoundCloud) but also it’s just an old name (Stimmung) for something that may not be new at all.
When Heidegger says Gestell is Janus-faced (two-faced like a bitch, we say elsewhere), that fits in with what we’ve been calling two-headedness on TikTok.
All of this is a perfect image of Gestell facing Ereignis (shift) on the one side and extinction (machenschaft) on the other. You would need at least two faces to see the passing metrics of magic devastation.
Angelicism01 adapted translation.
"repetition and extinction precede and surround the question of ontology as Heidegger sees it"
i have to think the occlusion u speak of is a waiting, or an offering, or a preparing-the-ground-for. if we are or might be the ones who are going to find out if our extinction bears repetition, and if he knew this was the problem, then he knew it could only be now that we find the problem. Like Heisman i think it was about leaving something behind. Contributions = Suicide Note.
the end of the universe seems comploicated