THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART XVII: EVERYTHING IS EXTINCT
THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART XVII: EVERYTHING IS EXTINCT
'Threadsuns' and thread clouds. The emptiness of all online content. Mondina. The Angelicism seminar. Nothing to learn.
‘ANGELICISM WILL GIVE A SEMINAR’
The end of the universe series has been ongoing for approaching three years. This is the seventeenth part. The series was originally designed as a kind of written seminar or set of ‘prompts’. These prompts were also referred to as ‘reading cues’. The idea was that reading and education as such were over but that online experience and presence pointed to a different type of pedagogical formation.1
The first part of the series was published on 6 July 2021—that is, during the period of time that came to be known as ‘the vibe shift’. The end of the universe series came out of the vibe shift and extended it across time, till now. It was a matter of learning—that is, unlearning—what the vibe shift was. And to do so beyond any moment in time.
The atomic elements of ‘the vibe shift’ were ‘posts’, including the pith-posts of X (formerly known as Twitter). In other words, the reading cue or prompt was the style of a certain kind of sped-up online education. Posting was—and perhaps still is—unlearning.
The first section of the first part of the series was called,
THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, OR, THE VIBE SHIFT (LANGUAGE BELONGS TO NOBODY)
and this itself is a good example of a reading prompt or cue. In the first section of the first part of the end of the universe seminar, it was said,
We are connecting the Pure Vibe as an event in reading and as a shift that may be more than phasic with the immense problem of contemporary time.
In other words, an event in time was an event in reading. People on the internet around that time were learning to read and unread in new ways. They were the carriers of a new style of reading and unreading. They were the (perhaps largely unconscious) carriers of a new style of learning and unlearning.
Let’s abbreviate this even more.
The vibe shift was the potential of a pedagogical moment, of a teaching moment that was latent and to-be-developed. The pressure we worked under was ‘the internet’ but the second pressure was so-called ‘extinction conditions’. Learning and unlearning on the internet were potentiated. They were initialized.
The internet was teaching us to learn and teaching us to teach in new ways because of the speed of events in the world.2 The internet was exposing a world of speed under potential extinction conditions.
EVERYTHING IS EXTINCT
Here is a new reading prompt or cue for us to get going with:
everything is extinct
This allows us to go unthinkably quickly by cutting all content at the root. ‘Content’ here means all future atoms of language, information, intelligence, and so on. Instead of concerning ourselves with everything going extinct—the most common misunderstanding of what angelicism was about—we concern ourselves with what it means for everything to be extinct.
This particular reading cue is exceptional in all sorts of ways. It allows all content to be seen through and let go in one cut. And this in a sense is the essence of education under internet conditions.
Such conditions—the internet, extinction (whose sense is thereby fluid)—exist whether we are online or offline. One no longer has to be online to be online. One no longer has to be online to be online since, presumably, the internet has already taught us what the internet means.
One post is enough to graduate from the internet if we are open enough to go back and repeat and see what it meant. What it meant was
everything is extinct
and this being-extinct-of-everything is extinction in another sense. We can say that this other-sense-of-extinction was only ever going to be available to those who enter into the senses of extinction and wear them down. Samsara and Nirvana are words written on either side of a single piece of paper where one side is totally blank.
THE CUT OF (ALL) CONTENT
Cutting all content at the root does not mean cutting off all content. It does not mean shunning content and creating nothing. It means that we cut the very idea of content at the root. We cut content itself out, even though content may still exist.
Education might claim to rebegin by assuming that the experience of the internet is in fact vital, whether we remain there or not. What happens is that under extinction-internet conditions all content is let go.
Here is another reading prompt:
‘Angelicism’ is itself nothing and has always been about nothing, so it can’t really be a form of education. It can’t really be a new school or even a new style of seminar. But perhaps it can be an incitement—the incitement itself—to wanting everything to be about nothing.
A political aspiration could be dreamt up of wishing everything to be about nothing. ‘Angelicism’ is not a name among others, since it actually names the situation in which all names will be defined of themselves. It consists of the self-dissolution of its name and every name, the twin-birth of perfect intelligence and namelessness. ‘Angelicism’ was the perfect name of that which was about nothing.
In wanting everything to be about nothing, school’s out. At this point—or something like it—angelicism will give a seminar. This seminar will be led by Lola Jusidman, who writes on Substack here and is on Instagram here. She is also known as Impossible and Mondina, among other names. Here is a reading prompt from her writing:
nothing will convey, render, survive, impart, travel, forget
Angelicism, like the family in Duras’ Les enfants, asks ‘what is the point’ and has no obvious political program. The point is to see that we are doing nothing and perhaps to do even less.
Mondina says that the point is ‘to see that we are doing nothing and perhaps to do even less’. In other words, doing nothing is one thing, but we can also do even less. Doing nothing is one thing, but there is less than nothing, and therefore many different nothings, and so nothing is never one thing. There is no ‘obvious political program’ in this, and yet we can also say that the emptying out of all political content (‘success’) perhaps has something to do with our inability to do nothing.
What is hard here is
giveupness
and this constitutes a one-word lesson. A one-word prompt and reading cue. Forming sentences is relatively superfluous after all; all we need is one-word.
‘Giveupness’ is a sole focus. It is a lesson about the sole-focus. It’s a cut.
THE YOUNG GIRL SINCE HEGEL: WHY EDUCUATION ALWAYS FIGURES THE ‘YOUNG GIRL’, WHY ANGELICISM ALWAYS FIGURES THE ‘YOUNG GIRL’
Since Hegel at the very least, education has been about the cut. It has also—through figurative reliance—been about the young girl. Let’s explain what we mean.
Education increases in superfluity and abbreviation as time goes on. In a passage from the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes,
The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation (Durchbildung) of the natural consciousness. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made (vorbereitet); the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more . . . the truncated (abgeschnitetne) generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of determinate being.
What Hegel is describing here two hundred years ago is the becoming-prompt of all content. He is describing the process whereby we will arrive at the point where we say with certainty, ‘everything is extinct’.
The contrast here—two hundred years ago—is between ancient times and the modern age. We are now, let’s say, not in the modern age that Hegel was thinking about. By now—two hundred years later—we have to assume that something else has happened to the complete formation (Durchbildung) that originally characterized education and culture as such. The internet is one name among others for that further event and happening.
It is here in Hegel’s description that he happens to mention a certain young girl. The previous forms of education are handed down to us in an abbreviated or ready-made fashion, and at this point the comparison is to
beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly Fate has offered us, as a young girl might set the fruit before us.
In an extremely abbreviated way, we can see that the young girl here is not just a figure of abbreviation itself, she is irl setting the fruit of accelerated education before us. ‘She’ is the figure of school being out. ‘She’ is school’s out.
As a plastic figure, the young girl was there in Hegel’s prose two hundred years ago denoting the ‘modern age’, and she is here right now, denoting the techno-tele-ecocide moment of the present.
SIMPLIFICATION AS EDUCATION
In her book The Future of Hegel, Malabou writes that
we should look to the process of simplification (Vereinfachung). Simplification is at work throughout the development of spirit. For as the speculative content is unfolded, it moves towards simplifying itself, which is to say, it abbreviates and accelerates itself. Of prime importance to Hegel in his logic and ontology, simplification is the essence and aim of speculative teleology. The simplifying speculative telos requires as its precondition that cooperative play of habit and alienation.
Getting simpler and simpler as it goes along, spirit (absolute vibe) becomes radically simple. It becomes
more simple than simplicity itself.
The simplifying aspect of internet culture as an alternative means of educative formation beyond the ‘modern age’ takes place as an emptying of all content. Content becomes so empty that it is
emptier than emptiness itself.
Note again that Mondina writes that ‘the point is to see that we are doing nothing and perhaps to do even less’.
In a recent talk Fred Moten contrasts set theory and a John Donne poem and says
insofar as it’s possible to conceptualize one infinity that would be bigger than another infinity, what Donne is doing is attempting to conceptualize one nothing that would be less than other nothings.
Mondina’s reference to doing perhaps less than nothing opens up next to Moten’s idea of nothing-degrees or degrees of nothing. Moten imagines an alternative universe to the universe of set theory.
In other words, there is not just one universe of infinities, there are many. There is even an infinity of universes of infinities, and set theory is here simplified (abbreviated) to being an example. In the practice of Dzogchen ‘infinity’ is simply a concept or context like any other and we can always think beyond infinities, beyond infinite space.
As part of the same gesture and space we can also practice nothing and degrees of nothing, in this non-positive set theory of nothings. I want everything to be about nothing, sure, but I will find myself making this nothing that becomes everything into something, so we need a context in which this can be the case.
If angelicism gives a seminar, as it now will, then it allows itself to ask these questions, which are really just answers and single words. ‘Education’ might allow everything to dissolve in a single word.
LIGHT
Education might allow everything to dissolve in light of a single word.
Here are some single words that prompt and simplify and abbreviate the contents of the angelicism seminar:
the Good
the nothing
set theory
relaxation
physics
extinction
Angelicism once dreamt of being a white table with the word ‘extinction’ written on it that costs a trillion ETH. We can always brand angelicism if we want to. We can brand it as the emptiness of all content. We can brand it as The Good. We may wish it to be The Good, where the Good has a specific Platonic sense of a kind of limit to the too much in online physics. The Good is the place where the limit to the Absolute is named, and held. ‘Here we can see it.’ ‘Here we can see the outer forms.’
(Whereas Simone Weil said, that which limits is God, we will say that that which limits is The Good.)
Another way of tracking the cognitive-perceptual re-speciation of humanity is between on and offline, and we do in fact want what was called angelicism to be more like a trillion ETH white table than a white Instagram slide. It is on this table that the seminar will take place.3 It is on the table and the whiteboard that AMOC figures may be set out.
How we will define the Good in this seminar is as follows, and here are some more key reading cues:
The Good is the limit to the too much of online physics.
And also this, which appeared in ‘The Place of the Absolute’ on 19 April 2022:
The place of the Absolute, at which it takes place that the Absolute is not: this is the Good.
The limit that the Good is is also according to Moten a certain type of light string, or light stringing (the ‘threadsuns’ of Celan), and this is another context: the same context ‘in which the last word or the last note or the unique name of the final declaration of unique namelessness disappears’.
We can say that we need a table and a light slant because this is the work. It calls for some name, some seminar. Dissolution-at-once is iterative, even right against the so-called end.
When we ask the other where they are, they might answer, ‘in the painful process of learning how to focus’.
Angelicism will give a seminar in NYC between April and June this summer. It is called 𝘼𝙈𝙊𝘾 𝙎𝙝𝙪𝙩𝙙𝙤𝙬𝙣: 𝙨𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙡’𝙨 𝙤𝙪𝙩. More details are available here. The present series of posts about ‘the end of the universe’ will also be active during this period.
Reading and education were over under internet conditions. These conditions were also extinction conditions. We can speak quite simply of an internet-extinction event. This event was called ‘the vibe shift’. The ideal seminar would be a seminar on the vibe shift.
The internet was teaching us to learn in new ways and allowing us to learn to teach in new ways. The abbreviation that the internet teaches us—silently—is a new form of education, school, seminar.
It’s on the table that everything can be tabled.