THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART XIX: BIANCA'S BED, THE END OF THE UNIVERSE BED, THE ANGELICISM SEMINAR AND THE SCHOOL OF DECISION
Extinction bed-ins, angelicism nests (to come), the school(s), the decisions for infinity. The academy.
Can Yzy make this bodysuit? Honey THIS IS YZY. Also if the question is ‘can Yzy make?’ the answer is always yes.—rooftopdarling, ig story, 1 April 2024
THE SCHOOLS OF BIANCA, YE, BADIOU AND JOHN LENNON (THE ENORMOUS WHITE BED)
We know that Ye has his own idea of what a school should be—a Donda Academy for example or a listening session or a king size bed—and that he is looking for a single image. An axiom of angelicism in 2023 was
one artwork per century
and by now that might be
one artwork per millennium.
As we swim more in the going of time, we see that it’s less and less right to post something in the place of nothing. The earth is immediate and an angel. A single post and then delete it.
Think of Kanye’s massive white bed.
The image-making of Ye 2024 should be kept purely abstract, like a decision. Like a school of decision. As I said to 5212 when he tweeted and then deleted something about 01,
Yeah it feels increasingly less right to put something in the place of nothing, I understand
The place of nothing is white, it’s basically ‘white’, and the more one puts something in its place then the more like Bianca’s bed it gets (the post is already gone).
ULTRA-ENLIGHTENMENT (WHITE) (THE IMAGE OF THE SCHOOL IN FINITUDE)
So ye is working at a single image, one every thousand years. He basically joined fka-angelicism, like everyone else did. New York is the most important cultural capital on the only living planet in the universe and we’re making this single white bed image in the middle of it. François Jullien said, ‘there is, and can only be, one nude’. Bianca’s image on the bed is what he meant. It’s also an architectural image, like an image of the single white nipple of NYC. Which still, uh, sucks.
Our reading cue here would be this one,
I need to make you my object in order to gain access to your infinity.
Or,
I need to make you my object in order to gain access to your infinity because infinity is running out and that’s what makes it so infinite.
The best thing to do at the end of time is just let go. Like, what the hell does it matter anymore. I love you so much forever for one last time, I really do. I love you so much forever for one last time at the end of time. There’s nothing left to do and this is it.
Every time you post it leaves a scar because it could have been nothing. The scar is there because it’s about the fact you placed something there when it could have been nothing. That shimmer isn’t what you wanted, even though you posted it for hundreds of years. It feels infinite underneath anyway.
François Jullien also said,
Each nude presents itself as though it were the first nude ever, impossible to integrate entirely into the image, whether pictured among leaves, in an armchair, against a window, or even on a bed.
François Jullien was talking about Ye and his effort to make a single image of Bianca on a bed, doesn’t matter if it’s an actual nude or not (it’s still a nude). Ye’s being in love at the end of time is what enabled him to make such a white image, and then change his pfp to pure white. At that point 01 became Ye.
In a deleted essay I called this,
absolute content.
In a recent episode of New Models on Ye and the future of content, they speak of the first apocalypse of my lifetime taking place now in the age of ye and absolute content, a content that aggregates (cites) its own emptiness in a style of post-posterity writing. It’s the age of massive strange attentional objects that are at once mid, mass and singularly subjective. It’s a moment of the spectacularly mindless, where the Children of Dimes Square and The River (the bar) are just carriers of the stuctureless answerlessness of incipient AI.1
THE INTERNET IS KILLING US, LESS SOON
The internet kills us, and we need to be wary. The Good is that which limits, it limits the internet. These, at least, are axioms we can work with when things get quiet or tough. There is a low-production-value-writing available. A post-posterity art. I was doing that just above. The Children of Dimes know what all this means. They are the school’s out children. This is how they read. You can find them on a kind of street.
Bianca the architect and absolute content. There’s going to be an angelicism seminar in two weeks to address the whole thing. The ig for the seminar is here and our other main ig is here.
Imagine a seminar that begins with these words on a whiteboard:
less soon
In the classic style of the French seminar (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, and so on, all the way to Ye), the words sit there throughout the seminar and are not commented on. The audience is relieved of any kind of duty. Perhaps told to do nothing. Just be in your bed all day, all week. Imagine ‘peace for extinction’. Meditate on a single white ig square. Post in bed for what was once called ‘extinction’ and then became nothing.
THE WHITEBOARD
The act of drawing something or writing something on a whiteboard in the room or space we choose already takes us somewhere.
What is shown or written is not seen, what is said is never listened to: and we can gather and/or write on the whiteboard several passages about this.
An angelicism seminar: what is its relation to the thing called ‘education’? If we are starting anew—and we must pretend we can one last time—isn’t the relation to ‘education’ loosened up?
Can we teach hopefreeness (at all)?
What would that be like?
THE SCHOOL OF DECISION
When it comes to whiteboards, we must also mean schools. In this context we think not only of Ye but also of The Children and place that on the syllabus, about to be released. We begin to think about the absence of schools (as in late Duras, where the school is dissolved, or ‘out’). We might also think of the reference in Badiou’s Being And Event to ‘the school of decision’ (Being and Event, p. 149). This latter reference comes at the end of the thirteenth mediation:
At the very least, one consolation remains; that of discovering that nothing actually obliges humanity to acquire this knowledge, because at this point the sole remit for thought is to the school of decision.
The whole of page 149 might be read carefully in an extended seminar on nothing, on infinities, and on finitude.
The ‘knowledge’ Badiou means is the knowledge in favour of the decision for the possible infinity of being. A decision for the possible infinity of being might be made and this is the one that seems to concern Badiou in relation to a non-specified idea of ‘the school’.
On the one hand, Badiou wants to set up and assure the superiority of an affirmative thought of the infinities to such an extent that ‘the finite’ becomes ‘the exception’. The knowledge that might be acquired by humanity presumably in good time—since the finite is, the question of time is still in play—is the knowledge of the infinities as a counter against what Badiou later on calls ‘the ideology of the finite’. And yet Badiou, as ever throughout the course of his work, cannot be as assured as he appears to wish to be. The ‘decision’ for the infinities is first of all just that, a ‘decision’, and so we will soon need a ‘school’. But if we need a school then this is because the decision is not learned—not yet learned. Hence Badiou refers to ‘the possible infinity of being’ and not to the actual, already affirmed infinity of being, which would mean school’s out.2
Badiou sets up a choice here and yet surely it would be quite easy to contend that there is no choice and that the power of indestructible goodness in spontaneous free space runs continuous and always up against special-effects of infinite and sometimes equal impermanence:
A human is that being which prefers to represent itself within finitude, whose sign is death, rather than knowing itself to be entirely traversed and encircled by the omnipresence of infinity.
Badiou will console himself with freedom, with the fact that nothing obliges us to know one supposed fact or another, but then, crucially, with something called ‘the school of decision’ it is as if this freedom would finally be worn down into yet another possibility.
The effect of Badiou’s final statement in the thirteenth mediation is something like the following: there is still school. There is still some kind of school. In the time still here, there are effects of ‘learning’. There are two types of knowledge that co-exist and yet one is more beneficial than the other. Sometimes these knowledges must clash and yet what of reconciliation? For this we would need a decision. And this decision would need a new type of school. And yet, isn’t school out? Don’t we simply have ‘the children’ who already know all this and no possible school at all?
Interestingly, at the start of the next meditation Badiou writes as follows:
The historicity of the decision on the being of infinity is inscribed in the thesis ‘nature is infinite’ (and not in the thesis ‘God is infinite’).
A decision ‘on’ is something different to a decision as if pre-given in favour of the possible infinity of being. Is Badiou making a decision or has infinity already decided in our place? Why is mathematics even needed? Badiou is also keen here to distinguish in a clear-cut fashion the historicity of the decision in infinite nature from an infinite God, and yet once again, it is quite easy to see a resemblance between the two, and the need to so clearly demarcate one from the other may betoken an anxiety, for example around the quiet certitude of an ontological triumphalism. (What we have, in brief, is the mathematical dogmatism of a certain strain of contemporary French thought up against an American realism of the concept, a white bed. These things won’t be named even as they are but we can see that ‘Frenchness’—French ass Badiou—can always be eaten for breakfast by street pragmatism, just as American pragmatic dogmatism relapses into religious reactions. The infinite can always just be God. On white on god.)
There is, perhaps, to adopt Badiou’s evasively beautiful and beautifully evasive tone,
less soon.3
The launching of infinity Yzy and angelicism pop-up academies as if to say all this at once, making a silhouette, making a bed; and we may ask can Yzy do it, and, according to rooftopdarling’s post yesterday, the answer is always yes.
—01, 2 April 2024
Ye is the ultimate selector. He edits white on white and then deletes. The agent, the prompt director, the analyst.
Presumably, if there were an actual fully mobilized knowledge of infinity, we would be out of school forever. A.G.I. infinity would be a form of drug.
This instalment was written quickly, as if to say: the infinity academies are also post-posterity spaces.