THE FACE OF ELIZA DOUGLAS, PART 1: THE COMPLETION OF SOUNDCLOUD IDEALISM
The soundcloudettes hit the sky deck.
‘painted for the end of time’
In any speculative phenomenology of ‘being cancelled’, the static geometric points of the body are in the process of being re-installed or -scheduled, for the body (whatever body here means) in the process of cancellation is also a body with no real horizon line. It is the-body at-the-end-of-time.
In this sense the process of cancellation (which is also a procedure) resembles what Elie During describes as the ‘orbital condition’. It is what Anne Imhof, who signs herself AI, calls an ‘image’. Isn’t it also a transition?
‘There is no meaning other than the meaning of cancellation’, said Jean-Luc Nancy, but at the same time this is not true at all. The meaning of cancellation, in the age of its culture, is also the story of its limitation.
In the description of cancellation, which just is its experiential plane, viewpoints are overwhelmed and we enter a polyfocal floating, a space mimicked in the tonal variety of these brief and unstable propositions.
In its purest logic and tropology cancel culture ends up saying only that only the cancelled can speak.
Here are other ways of saying the same: ‘only the cancelled one can speak’, ‘only the cancellee can commit to the extendable act of something else, even if too late in time’.
This is what makes the cross-fade from normal gravity to an ontology and physics of zero-gravity angelic or even orgasmic.
The figure of the angel always arises in these precincts not just because of its primal status as cancelled being but also because of its relation to direct intuition. In Aquinas angels learn fast; they read without reading; they set off as if exclusively from intuition.
The angels have immediate rather than discursive knowledge and this form of angelic knowledge works by jumps: from a to c without need of b (infinite speed). Learning in thin air is almost identical to angelic intelligence (AI) which is a key harbinger of technology (AI) and its social applications.
Only the deleted can find the right orbital distance at the-end-of-time.
In Summa Theologiae itself, Volume 9, Angels: 1a. 50-64, Foster translates intelligere angeli as ‘angelic knowledge’ where obviously it means or could mean ‘angelic intelligence’ or even ‘intelligent angelicism’ or again ‘intelligent angelic knowledge’. Either way, cancel culture clearpills intelligere angeli.
The cancellee is vulnerable to a kind of threshold hookup and it is this vulnerability that can be heard and seen through the phenomenology of vulnerability in general, the vulnerability hookup recognising a kind of cogito ergo cancelled.
The new weightlessness of the deleted (a heavy and heaving blow) means that a dialectical engagement can be had with the cosmic singularity of additional nonfinalism as such, that is, with the idea that that the Idea of the end of the universe be subject to and available for iteration.
The right orbital distance comes down to the right distantial amount of grace and right amount of iterability.
Since de Man clearly recognised the machine of text, and its inherently implied impossibility of reading Reading itself, as anti-grav, we can see that ‘cancel culture’ is more than a new form of the Hegelian negative or Cross.
The anti-grav body of the cancellee is a purely grammatical body, its opacity a tribute to the degree of politically vital toxins that can be supported and adhered to aphonically and blindly. It is clear hoopee beauty in a trick shot as a sling shot in time.
The deleted are nonfinalist heroes. Instead of having to ‘pick a side’ (finitude/infinities) as the sine qua non of modern ontological action, for them there is no need to add anything beyond the movement of cancellation itself—we simply observe the white space. To adhere to ‘the cancellation’ is to adjust the body absolutely to a second body body only under pressure from itself; that is, a body under no pressure save pressure of microgravity.
The ‘no time’ motif that burned out Mark Fisher is made into a kind of completion, a late music, an obscenity tattoo. Fisher was not distended enough to hear what would have come at the end of time in place of a limited cancellation of the future.
This rounding out and floating off can esoterically be called the completion of SoundCloud Idealism.
It is the deleted one who in an internal somersault of infinite motion can redesign the movement of cancellation and notate how abstraction automates itself.
If it is culture itself that is toxic, if it is culture itself that breaks the internet and not just diagrams of climate science, then cancel culture is redesigned. Or rather, it is the redesign. Cancel culture is the already-artificiality of culture’s own impeccably predesigned fade.
Cancel culture being redesigned as the cancellation of culture itself.
See Anna Khachiyan’s tweets tearing Hannah Black apart or Fred Moten coolly dissecting the barbarity of cancellism as too much an absolute.
The re-fit of cancel culture also works through what Husserl called imaginative variation to conceive uninvited cosmological interviews. The idea that the end of the universe may be eidetically varied (cancelled as cosmic singularity) allows to be generic (imagined otherwise) any such other finalism. The dialectical engagement with the additional finalism implied as a vision adventure has to be viewed and bent from the right orbital distance: from the outside. Design steps in where there is no time for cancellation to be carried to the term. It is the ‘and so on’ and the ‘maybe we don’t have time to wait’. The ellipsis of end-of-universe forcing.
Why did Andrea Long Chu have to cancel Avital Ronell? Because she was always about to be dispossessed. And to remember the morning light.
The relation of the angel and the machine is implied in everything we have been saying, the dire lyric enumeration at the end of time. Dispossession is itself a form of angelicism and the rhetoric and tropology of deletion as intelligence implies an unearthly apophenia (overreading). It is soundcloud rappers who have an original relationship with script, transcendental mumble, and with what is even called understanding on sight. Soundcloudettes do not make music because they are music, and we can add that the end of the universe does not compute because it varies. To be reading, to be a part of mere reading and absolute design, is fundamentally different from attempting to read or from saying this or that statement. Angelicism as mere reading and absolute design is non-thetic and mute; it comes down to a pure form of silent reading, like the superjouissance of spending a year online hate-following. The tenacity of hate sets off interpassive unreading as a productive form of sustained universal angelicist historical attack. Angelicism is the alloverdose. And reading, at the end of time, isn’t needed. Even a deleted soundcloud rapper isn’t dumbass enough to not know that.
Until there are trillions, until there are enough for every new combination to have been made superfluous in advance, until there are trillions to learn superfluity in all, before the end, and until there are trillions to come.