THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART X

Definitions of emptiness. Consequences of emptiness. Emptiness and Asiatic modes of production. Emptiness and the lexicon of crypto.

EMPTINESS EMPTINESS EMPTINESS

Here is the reading cue:

emptiness

It was said in the last part that this word was enough. We asked why it was not OK to simply repeat the word. But there is no why to it. Because it is OK to simply repeat emptiness.

EMPTINESS EMPTINESS EMPTINESS

The extraordinary thing is as follows:

emptiness

In the space of writing we take this ‘emptiness’ to be a given. That is, we are already quite certain what emptiness is.

Not only did we see what emptiness is in the last three parts of this series but we know what emptiness is in ourselves.

‘In a way everyone knows everything’, writes Duras. But this is too literary. What we know for certain is that everyone knows emptiness (everything).

The hesitation of the ‘in a way’ in literature and philosophy is not discretion but lack of openness to emptiness emptiness emptiness. (It is lack of practice.)

EMPTINESS

We know what emptiness is because all words are emptiness. Once we know that the being of everything is emptiness, including heaven and immortality, we know what all words are going to mean in advance. (Emptiness.)

And once we know this we know that the only thing worth doing is repetition of emptiness. How could it not be?

This last move is more than radical. It is more than radical in a way that dissolves the whole of artistic plasticity and thought and the sciences including mathematics; it is more than radical because once we move into repetition of emptiness, quality does not count.

That is, in great art or in great science ‘quality’ (which also implies ‘technical precision’) is supposed to be a pure value placed over mere ‘quantity’. But once we have emptiness, we have emptiness as the only thing that counts, so all that counts is its repetition (and here precision, ugliness, beauty, none of this matters).

When it comes to the quality of emptiness, all that counts is quantity.

DEFINITIONS

Once we are in emptiness, which means once we see that the meaning of all words is emptiness, we see that all definitions (for example dictionary definitions) are superstitious.

Being in emptiness as much as possible means accepting that all words, because they mean emptiness, are open to meaning what they don’t say (emptiness).

They are open to what they can’t yet say according to superstition (emptiness).

For example, there is a space that is other than space, there is a universe that is other than universe, there is a heaven that is other than heaven, there is a love that is other than love, there is a kissing that is other than kissing, there is a writing that is other than writing, there is an everything that is other than everything, and there is an end of the world that is other than end of the world.

CERTAINTY BEYOND CERTAINTY

Emptiness is a point of support. Emptiness is a point of absolute support without support. Emptiness is a point of certainty beyond certainty and wavering.

Here is our reading cue:

since we are already quite certain of what emptiness is, therefore follow the consequences . . .

If you pause for a moment, you can feel all the consequences. You follow them all in one. (Or, will have done—in emptiness.)

The first consequence is that we know what all words mean in advance, even ones that don’t exist yet, since their meaning is always emptiness.

The second consequence is that we know all solutions to all problems will consist of emptiness, therefore we know what all solutions to all problems are.

Take the universe for example. We can talk about the universe and what it means, different theories of it. We can talk about the end of the universe and we can talk about the start of the universe, we can talk about how the universe is infinite in all directions, we can talk about its size and shape. And yet, the meaning of the universe is emptiness. That is, since the universe is made up of emptiness and since it makes no sense to try to contain or limit emptiness, the universe is pure emptiness and can have no beginning or end. Neither is the universe infinite or the same in all directions. Because the universe is emptiness, it will be empty of infinities and of conventional sameness and of any characteristics at all.

THIRD CONSEQUENCE

If the universe has no beginning or end because it is emptiness, then there is no universe. Since the universe is defined as something with defined limits or non-limits, as something that either ends or has no ending, and both aspects mean that ‘universe’ becomes a word separate from ‘emptiness’, then there is no universe.

THE UNIVERSE IS NOT

In emptiness, the universe is not. Therefore there is no end of the universe at all.

There is no end of the universe because there is no universe.

THEREFORE

Therefore there are no definitions.

THE UNIVERSE

The universe is itself a definition therefore it cannot mean what it means because what it really means is emptiness.

THE HINT

We saw in the last part that the eye is a hint. We look at the human eye and it is a hint about the meaning of all words, their emptiness. The eye looks but it has nothing to say. The eye looks all the way through the universe of emptiness. The eye is therefore more than radical.

We are already quite certain of what emptiness is, therefore follow the consequences. These consequences are self-contained or internal. What we mean by internal is that they reside in pure repetition. We do not need technical (artistic) precision to know what emptiness is, to know what the consequences are.

If emptiness means the meaning of all words and ideas no matter what they are, then we shouldn’t have a discussion at all, since what would we be discussing?

WHEN IT COMES TO WHAT EMPTINESS IS

When it comes to what emptiness is, we simply say it is not this and it is not that. Once again then, we shouldn’t have a discussion.

Once we know that emptiness is not this and not that, we know that every single x will be the subject of the same emptiness grammar.

We could sit around and find something else to say, something other than emptiness, but what’s the point? In fact, whatever we come up with other than emptiness is completely irrelevant and insignificant.

HEURISTICS

If we want to translate this into other languages and idioms we can do.

In a way all we are saying is that all intentional cognition is heuristic cognition. Heuristic simply means a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments efficiently. But in meaning this it also means a kind of shrinking down of meaning and a reliance on specifics.

So a dictionary definition of a word is heuristic in the sense of limiting that word to a socially given and lower-dimensional set of meanings that allows easy access (the neural shortcut part of heuristics).

But take the word ‘universe’ for example. The heuristic for ‘universe’ is something like: an enormous, perhaps infinite space that is often defined as having some kind of beginning and some kind of end (the Big Bang followed by the Big Crunch or Big RIP and then perhaps followed by the Big Bounce).

But what all definitions (qua heuristic) miss out, by definition of being definitions, is emptiness. Individual definitions, in wanting to be detailed and heuristic, all miss out the one thing that can be defined and is worth defining: emptiness.

This means that the definition of all definitions is emptiness, but the definition is also the occlusion of emptiness. What all words and definitions make us do is absent emptiness as their background cognition (awareness).

EMPTINESS DEFINED

We can observe that normal uses and definitions of words appear to possess an exceptional nature, so that the word ‘God’ seems to have a history and meaning wildly different to the word ‘nature’.

We are also taught in schools and universities not to simply reduce everything to the same thing, as if that would be a useless collapsing.

This is what we mean by detailism. That academic and philosophical and artistic work is getting more and more detailed and complex and at the exact same moment what is really available is emptiness as something more simple than the simple.

Take the work of Gabriele de Seta, which is highly detailed. This work matches the curve of technological precision itself. As technology advances in partnership with humans, humans also notate in detail all that is happening in the progression, and this involves analytic ‘disaggregation’.

For example, de Seta’s paper ‘Huanlian, or changing faces: Deepfakes on Chinese digital media platforms’ argues for a work of ‘historicizing, contextualizing, and disaggregating’. The first two are not enough, we also have to break down content into ‘as many small pieces as possible’.

But we already know that all of these small pieces are emptiness and so each small piece has the appearance of an increasingly heuristic enclosure for emptiness.

OR MONGOL MODERNITY FOR EXAMPLE

Or we can listen to a podcast, for example the episode created by The Pseudodoxology Podcast Network called ‘The Newfoundland Episode Epilogue: Hitler and the Holy Grail’.

This episode involves someone called ‘Haz from Infrared’ who makes a number of detailed points about something called ‘communism’. His argument seems to come down to saying that the annihilation of private property according to the contemporary Asiatic mode of production is communism itself. 

Haz from Infrared also speaks of ‘Mongol modernity’, forces of levelling, Marx being the most anti-Communist Communist you can imagine, the ‘detailed objectivity’ of liberal capitalism, densification, the ways in which socialists can be reactionaries, feudal socialists, how the abstractions of capital are an inevitability, and so on.

If we wish, we can say that all of this is ‘interesting’. Haz from Infrared makes it sound like something like ‘communism’ still exists and is getting somewhere through a series of ‘detailed’ historical abstractions. The most interestingly ‘detail’ is China itself.

In these terms, there would be no such thing as China fetishism, just the fact of detailed modes of objectivity in contemporary China. What is apparently exciting is the detailism of capital’s increasing objectivity as it solidifies and lights up as a whole country but also as cultural objects on the internet (for example AI-voiced academic conference papers on the use of Chinese-style bullet-titles at academic conferences).

CHINA IS EMPTINESS

Now, since we know that all that is is emptiness and that we merely have to follow the consequences, we can stop here and notice how the form of this argument about China feels academic and tiring.

Perhaps there are aspects of the argument that are technically accurate, but the question is, where is ‘China’ going?

We can see straightway not only that China is emptiness but that emptiness is ultimate abstraction without detailism. (Namely, emptiness is the pure abstraction and single detail of capital’s emptiness. It is capital’s seal.)

When Haz from Infrared makes his argument about the Asiatic mode of production, he does so without reference to Tibet, which Google will tell us is part of China.

Whatever Tibet is taken to be a part of, it is a part of emptiness. We can even say that Tibet is the home of emptiness and so the Asiatic mode of production is dependent on Tibet, and that this is the case both in the sense that all modes of production are emptiness but also in the sense that China depends on Tibet and its conquest for its future water supply.

China depends therefore not just on external resources for its detailed advances in capital objectivity display but on the emptiness tradition of Tibet (‘the Third Pole’).

Tibet is also empty and may be dissolved (China is already doing this successfully through linguistic, paper and spiritual ‘genocide’), but Tibet stands for a country that to some extent wished to be emptiness.

Haz from Infrared says that the site of disclosure for ‘detailed objectivity’ is England (symbolically) or China. But there can be no Asiatic or Anglo mode of production without reference to ‘Tibet’, without reference to Emptiness.

CRYPTO EMPTINESS

There is also the emptiness of the crypto world. We can see this world through the filter of emptiness as an accumulation of vocabulary. That is, the crypto world is a gathering of detailed capital objectivity in the form of new lexicons.

One might simply say that crypto is display of a new technical language. The crypto speculator speaks a technical language that will be foreign to some in the same way a mathematical language is or the speaking of Yupik.

Here is an example:

SolBlocks @Sol_blocks

3/ Each and every SolBlocks Series I (Fidenza) is a completely new, unique, algorithmically-generated piece of art created by utilizing Hobbs’ Fidenza script library, on Solana.

All we can say is that this accumulation of a new lexicon is emptiness emptiness emptiness. It typifies detailism, in that a new segment of capital as detailed objectivity is here being ‘leveraged’ and ‘disaggregated’ as a flash of language. And yet, we already know something else, which might be called for the moment ‘a higher technical language’, namely the language of emptiness.

Though emptiness does not depend on technical precision, technical precision is also empty, and available to emptiness. Emptiness sees through technical precision as a detailed objectivity format.

Emptiness sees through all, including defecation. Defecation is emptiness. The detailed accumulation of crypto lexicons is a form of defecation. What we are looking at is crypto faecal lexicon syndrome absent emptiness.

The crypto faecal lexicon derangement syndrome is emptiness.

ALL DEFINITIONS ARE THE SAME

We were saying above that all definitions are not, which also means they are the same. Not only are all things defined as emptiness but the definitions themselves are emptiness. We can add more and more historicizing, contextualizing, disaggregating and detailing (detailism) but really all we are doing is creating smaller and smaller pieces of an emptiness that remains the same: relaxed, spacious, all inclusive.

Insofar as emptiness is missed out by nearly all conventional and radical-conventional descriptions and definitions, all descriptions and definitions are heuristically devices of occlusion. They all are made of emptiness in the same way and they all occlude emptiness in the same way.

Time and again, in context after context, empirical and poetic and other research reveals that human cognition and meaning are simply not what we think they are. Except that human cognition and meaning are simply what we think they are and are always what we think they are. What we are is what we think we are but teaching heuristically occludes, emptiness.

SET THEORY

Badiou says that we have to know the detail of set theory to reach the beatitude of the absolute properly, but this is not true.

No matter how many times we write out new proofs of new infinity axioms, we also forget these new axioms absent an actual praxis.

Again, this is why quantity comes before quality even in the formal ontology of the absolute (Badiou).

(Notice that the beauty of set theory for Badiou is a kind of detailism. And that for Grothendieck the ‘stop’ is listening to emptiness emptiness emptiness.)

LOW-DIMENSIONS

R.S. Bakker’s essay ‘Discontinuity Thesis: A “Birds of a Feather” Argument Against Intentionalism*’ says what we are saying here, or nearly does.

Bakker holds back because he is still in the mode of a philosopher. He asks why a number of concepts (soul, game, correctness, and so on) all have the same features:

Anthropic. Low-dimensional. Functionally exempt from natural continuity. Inscrutable in terms of natural continuity. Source of perennial controversy. Possesses inexplicable efficacy.

Here is what he says when he asks the question:

The big question here, from a naturalistic standpoint, is whether all of these characteristics are homologous or merely analogous. Are the similarities ontogenetic, the expression of some shared ‘deep structure’, or merely coincidental? For me this has to be what I think is one of the most significant questions that never gets asked in cognitive science. Why? Because everybody has their own way of divvying up the intentional pie (including interpretavists like Dennett).

This sounds technical but by now we know what it means and we can even understand why Bakker is pretending to ask a question that is already answered.