The Five Different Types Of The End Of The World
How many types of world ending are there?
Let us schematise matters quickly and suppose that there are at least five different types of the end of the world, each corresponding to an épistème (in Foucault’s specific sense):
1. The first end of the world is what might be called the classical end of the world, which is to say the end of the world according to eschatological or theological rumour. Here one indexes Rapture, Millennialism, y2k, nuclear weapons, Doomsday, End-Times, various Ends of History, miserablism, and the psychopathology of melancholia (see: von Trier, but also Hitler, Wagner, and, differently, Future’s Trauerarbeit, and so on). This end of the world, we are told, has always been happening. The world has always been in the process of ending.
2. The second end of the world is thought and defined along social lines, as the deconstitution of existing social conditions. When Kathy Acker talks about ‘the end of the white male world’ or when the inhomogeneous field of ‘Black Studies’ talks about the end of the world of racial and carceral capital or when Marxists talk about the end of the world of wage labour (‘relentless criticism of all existing conditions’), a silent but nonetheless effective transferal has taken place between the theology of Rapture and the jargon of progressivism. The world that will end, now, is the world of social, racial, gender and conceptual capital, but not the world, not the world itself.
3. The third end of the world, and perhaps the most markedly contemporary of these epistemes, is the zone of indiscernibility between these last two different end-settings, between the first and second ends of the world. Here a social end of the world, the projected end of certain political givens, may also be phrased or appear as a total end of the world, an end of the world of our cognitive or social settings once and for all. In this zone, where the End of the World (simply, extinction qua extinction) can be ceaselessly confused with or strategically relayed via an end of the world (death as the end of a social regime, or extinction as the death of an individual psyche), one locates for example the late Derrida’s explicit interest in a death that is each time literally the end of the world, ‘at that end of the world that every death is’ (The Beast and the Sovereign), Césaire’s phrase in ‘Notebook Of A Return to The Native Land’, ‘The only thing in the world / worth beginning: / the End of the world of course [parbleu]’, Moten’s attestation in Blackness and Nothingness ‘that blackness bears or is the potential to end the world’, as well as Wilderson’s call for a ‘total end of the world’ in the interview given in and around Ferguson, Missouri, and known as ‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’. In these cases ‘end of the world’ seems to signify poetically and anexactly along all available edges, taking in the end of the world as the end of a set of social totalities (Marxism tout court) and the end of the world as the end once and for all of world as such. Épistème 3 as if loops back round in the socio-political lexicon of épistème 2 to adopt the theotropic language of épistème 1 — ‘doom’ — to prophesy and include the fourth and perhaps most radical épistème of the end of the world.
4. The fourth end of the world is the one thought according to an absolute difference and mathematisation. This end of the world is not social death (death as extinction), nor is it the extinction of the white male world — it is the sheering away of extinction from every available cognitive ideology and previous formalisation. Ultimately, this end of the world — the absence of even the conditions of extinction themselves — is not an end of the world at all, since it does not concern us and is relatable only according to a maths and an advanced plastification. The position implied here, at the far end, from end to end, beyond the end itself, is the position of having no-thing to do with life at all. This end of the world (extinction as outright attenuation) has no-thing to do with the world or with the end of the world as previously thought. Bion gets close to this in Transformations when he notates how a certain ‘←↕’ continues to be annihilative even after it ‘destroys existence, time, and space’.
Even though there are pockets of shared space between all four types of the end of world, the final episteme is taken to be distinctive — it demands, at least, for the present moment, to be read, or at least graphed. And it demands, it seems, that we formalise further. For example, when Moten says in 2015 in his ‘Blackness And Poetry’ talk, ‘it’s moving pretty quick now, we might not make it’, he alerts us to the rapidity that may just bring 4 in no time at all, despite the good work constantly done in 1 through 3. Moten locates, as it were, the zone of in-distinction between 4 and 3, between maths and politics, between coldness (final enumeration) and love (Marxism).
The contemporary moment seems defined by a confusion of all four senses of the end of the world, and by the inevitable (but nonetheless erroneous) relapse from the quasi-final sense to earlier senses. Insofar as there might be something like an archaeology of the end of the world, the absolute difference of anthropically accelerated auto-extinction may now perhaps be seen as the dominant épistème (although the very form of this statement is both a chance and a threat, an inevitability and, as we shall see, an error). Despite apparent priorities, there is a constant clashing of all four temporalities of ending, an inability to keep epistemes apart. The citations given in 3 (Césaire, Derrida, Moten, Wilderson) are already prescient materialisations of what is formulated in the space of 4 (Bion, and Moten). The End of the world is always (not) the end of the world.
Insofar as ‘the internet’ and the addictogenic screen are key determinants here, it is perhaps because the cerebral impact of technological acceleration is precisely what makes 4 increasingly inevitable while constantly short-circuiting us back into 1 through 3 at the cost of occluding the notational primacy of what might have come first. The end of the world as the end of certain social totalities may be theotropic unawares in precisely this way, as a jettisoning of the final Real in a strongly ‘popular’ retro-Marxian vein. At the same time, the final episteme and its mathematical absolutisation may now give way to yet another episteme, which is to say an ultra-formalisation, which we will call in this moment the cosmomatheme.
5. The fifth end of the world is a generic end of the world, or an ultra generics of (the) ends of worlds. This end of the world is the end of the world available, from end to end, to all other ends, and to all other worlds. In this domain the end of the world belongs to the sense of plural endings and differential cosmotechnics found in Derrida’s Les fins de l’homme and Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China. Equally at home here is a certain Brassier, which is to say the thinker of ‘the truth of extinction’. As soon as one allows Brassier’s ‘attempted philosophical universalisation of extinction’ to be a given, one makes extinction available to be thought, beyond itself, as ultra-generic (as e) or rather as cosmically ultra-generic (Ce). The suggested shift here is between Sellar’s two ‘images’ of man, the manifest and scientific images, re-imagined this time as two ends, which is to say the Sellarian shift now occurs between a manifest image of the end of the world (all the types and ideologies contained in 1 through 3) and a scientific or mathematico-scientific image of the end of the world as provided in 4 and beyond (but also in 1 through 3 in a different sense). If there is a 5, then, it corresponds to what Stiegler’s later work names the cosmic dimension of neganthroplogy, an imminent duty that ‘serves a sur-realist and serendipitous cosmology, a quasi-causal cosmology’. There is in effect only one image and one type of the end of the world, the image of the end of the world that is for every one and no one, the end of the world thought now as extinction tout court but made generically available in pure thought—and yet this one image, as if made for and of all the other images, saturates, magnifies and annihilates these others in turn.[1]
What may be named extinction as Concept forms the only real event on the timeline of an archaeology of ends insofar as it becomes explicit as natural truth, an anti-relativist value (e) incompatibly close to any local, cultural sense or intra-translation. The archaeology of the truth of extinction would by definition be anti-relativist or non-earth-centric insofar it stays alert to what Frank and Carroll-Nellenback call ‘models of planet-civilization interactions that show the onset of an Anthropocene-like transition may be a generic outcome of co-evolution’ (‘The Anthropocene Generalized: Evolution Of Exocivilizations And Their Planetary Feedback’). In sum, the central question of his numerology becomes enumeration itself: the maths of universal probability, which is to say of our probability—the probability of there being just one instance of the anthropic principle — us — if that universal probability just is us, along any time scale (was, is, will be), or even in any variant of other speculatively known and unknown universes (for instance in a theory of eternal inflation, and so on).
Thus the multiple and in fact rapid micro durées of end-settings we at first set out are even more fiercely oncoming and multi-fractal than formalised and perhaps not Foucauldian at all. Marxian progressivism merely looks like it gets beyond the religious eschatology it also seems to fall back into (both modes presuppose the heaven of a better sociality to come). Modern theories of all types invite the end of the world as the end of social cognitive domains (abolitionism(s) qua theotropology) and yet simply repeat the subcutaneous limitations of eschatological Marxism as the default mode (the relapse épistème) of the continuation of twentieth-century theoretical coutures. From here one moves to a universalisation that may be just as helpless faced with sheer material interruption, but which nonetheless (unstoppably) invites a new sequence: the maths of extinction, the ana-archaeology of extinction, the anthropology of the names of the end of the world.
[1] Cf. in this context Iain Hamilton Grant’s ‘Everything’: ‘The picture of reality as picture-involving yields the only consistent picture of reality.’
This piece was originally published in a raw state on a deactivated Tumblr in 2017. An archive of that version can be found here.