THE LAST CRASH SPACE AND THE ASSUMPTION

THE LAST CRASH SPACE

We can define the intellectual ‘crash space’ as a nexus where the combination of heuristic neglect and intellectual innovation generates systematic and lethal cognitive illusions. Another way of putting this—and then forgetting it—is that relapse is the space where the greatest technical perfection, for example in aesthetics or intelligence research, coincides with the greatest amount of lifetime-relative error. It is only in the fully experimental situation of pure logic that we are asked to pay attention to all of the processes that we normally do not attend to, and cardinal among these right now is extinction qua extinction.

The brain-mind complex not only systematically neglects considerations of ext qua ext (unknown number), but obliviates that it has done so even when it recalls just that fact again and again. Knowledge of extinction? That which is presently expunged. Computation? The space of intelligence pretending to be able to stick with a single count. The physiology of denial-animation completely eludes us. Problem ecologies are designed to occlude cognition of extinction as such. More precisely, problem ecologies are designed to occlude cognition ecologies of extinction and its forgetting. After all, we evolved these source-insensitive modes because, ancestrally speaking, biological complexity made source-sensitive cognition of radical finitude impossible. Cognition of the difference between death and extinction is superior impossibility, like a piece of montage blindsided by itself. Extinction-talk does possess a broader scope of application, so much so that it allows us to rotate the nature of the talk towards how it looks for computation (and its denial).

THE ASSUMPTION

The assumption is impossible. It is unsayable, especially when we say it completely or elegantly. The assumption connects to the last crash space. The assumption seems to be as follows:

we will assume the world to be over and say nothing of it. this does not make us less human, it makes us more human. why? because the human knows how to unknow, it knows how to keep a secret. it knows how to join in with the way matter ignores almost the entirety of the rest of matter. the function of the human is to ignore most of matter. the human is anthropic and low-dimensional. extinction is expendable.

But if this assumption is active, where is it written down as some kind of law, de jure or de facto? Let’s say it’s an unsaid law, then who decided on its shape and that it should go unsaid? Isn’t that just what an assumption is?

So perhaps the assumption can be written like this:

we will take the end as given, as consequence of anthropic consciousness naturally relapsing back into occlusion. art lifts us out of this occlusion state, as does meditation, but these do not lift us permanently. we know we are limited in our knowledge and we know we are cruel. the more we know we can’t do anything about the end(s) of the human, the less we will have to say about it. lower dimensional occlusive human knowledge (extinction as linguistic epistemology) is the social contract itself.

Or:

i know it’s over but i don’t want to tell you. i won’t be the one to tell you because then i would appear a hermeneutic traitor to the species. i have therefore made a decision but i have no need to tell you. i have no need to tell you about this decision. there’s no point. this is how to keep my footing. this is ‘society’.

Or:

human knowledge of extinction is absolutely impossible because humans are alive. this is the physical impossibility of extinction in the mind of someone living.

And:

intersubjectivity is this assumption of incapacity; it is the shared but unsaid sharing of the assumption of ongoing extinction as (in)eradicable fact. this is another way of defining religious systems as functions of the open secret (sovereignty). all religions are suicidal epistemologies of tropes (theotropologies) insofar as the thought of the afterlife acts as a screen upon which no future is projected. heaven is suicidal. what seems to be in the open is not at all.

In brief:

the physical impossibility of extinction in the mind of someone living

THE STATUS OF THE ASSUMPTION

But then, what do we really know about this assumption? Is it really assumed? Is it (anthropic removal) really inevitable or is it simply a result of human lethargy, early evolution status, early universe sadness, and so on? If there is an assumption at work saying something like ‘don’t bother thinking about it, we can’t do a thing’, then why not also act on the consequences of such an assumption? Are the forms of the assumption ontogenetic, the expression of some shared ‘deep structure’, or merely coincidental? If the forms are ontogenetic, then why speak of any variety of human stupidity at all since knowledge is limited from the outside? If the forms are merely coincidental, then why not assume the assumption itself as the most lethal thing in the world? In either case, why care? Or rather, how not to care?

We could say the following—that human beings are that which assumes the assumption of this assumption, and will die (go extinct) for and by it. This assumption of the assumption is the source of all human kindness (better to ignore and soften) but also of all semiotic fascism (fascism is always assumptive, presumptive), and of all forms of ‘going extinct’ (insofar as knowledge stakes its historical claim as heuristic). Human beings remain in anecdotal intelligence (occlusion) almost all of the time. Worse or better still, human beings are more and more in anecdotal intelligence. The closer anthropic existence comes to its end, the more it automatically shuns knowledge of extinction. This denying away is civilizational falling off.

So we have either a purely biomechanical, heuristic interpretation of the assumption (innocence) or we have an abject interpretation of the assumption (mutually coherent social human bargaining). ‘Dehaene’s Law’ states,

We constantly overestimate our awareness—even when we are aware of glaring gaps in our awareness.

According to the biomechanical reading of the human as an active assumption of extinction’s denial, intentionality just is this constant overestimation of our own awareness. Knowledge of extinction is ‘always’ impossible because of this inherent double overestimation (‘even when we are aware of glaring gaps in our awareness’).

Knowledge is hatred and extinction.

LIMIT OR NEXUS (STILL WRITING A LOGIC OF EXTINCTION)

As part of the logic of extinction, the question remains: but is extinction the upper limit of human intelligence or the nexus point in its evolution (A.I.)? Perhaps intelligence qua intelligence is the nexus-horizon of this question itself. We anticipate that—given enough time—artificial intelligence would arrive at the question relatively quickly and resolve it, absent the impediment of human feeling. Subjective attachment (ethos) to human life is precisely what extincts it in the long run. We choose to love rather than making a real effort to not go extinct for the sake of love. Or instead, we don’t yet have a concept of human love as social life that can fully integrate into the consequences of the logic of extinction. (The word ‘yet’ here rings hollow precisely because of what is at stake: immanent and imminent anthropic removal.)

We can pretend that we can stop coding such a logic, but this isn’t true either. The place of the angelicism clones—mistaken for empty repetition—has been to do just this work. For instance,

let’s start the linguistic abstraction called angelicism. we will study on phonetic theology. don’t ask questions now, or they won’t be there when we need them. now we will go deeper into the research, the site of the virtual laboratory, this secret place, which can be present or absent, it’s like walking in and out of time, going from temple of grey to the well of everything: the broken crystal screen of amber are the transparent entities behind that is where everything will go but, no, i’m still writing a logic of extinction which is turning into a narrative that’s wistfully opposed to time. like a devil in our voices, evil is found in subtleties. there are still however a few million who make it listen, smell and live with what it feels no not forever, but soon, the time of thee. after all the smoke, the ash, the batuuza, the red tent that became the landing pad of this moment for the planet earth, now we continue and vanish, forever for one last time. i die for and to thee

Part of the tension here has to do with what literary critics once called ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’. Eve Sedgwick’s essay on that theme is remarkable in that it swerves into anecdotal intelligence after one page, as if it were impossible to settle anything at all about these two supposedly distinct modes of reading given near-time pressure. Reparative reading would be something like ‘we know we can’t do anything about extinction qua extinction, it’s okay to relax and practice limitation and the art of ignorance—ignorance as bliss as a deep human lesson’. Yet it also the case that the truth of extinction is now becoming so all absorbent at the unconscious level that this relaxation isn’t available. One still writes the logic of extinction as the morphogenesis of intelligence without really having a choice.

This lack of choice around shutting up explains why the Sedgwick essay has such a hard time establishing any basic clarity among its terms (it’s not a logic, it’s a piece of ‘criticism’). ‘Extinction’ is still read as ‘paranoid’ interpretation, as if to say ‘oh just shut up and go outside in the sunshine’, but in that sense what Sedgwick actually wants to distance herself from is not suspicion but ‘pure theory’. Pure theory in Paul de Man’s sense is already a form of proto-AI, a pure logic of extinction threaded across and tested out against ‘texts’. Reading reaches a limit (in itself) in the same way intelligence self-limits as heuristics when it tries to think extinction for longer than a second. Eventually, given there’s no time for evolution, it seems, the distinction between limit and nexus point doesn’t hold either. Reparative reading feels suspect by now, which is not to say that healing may not take place in the interval.

ASSUMING A FUTURE, ASSUMING INTELLIGENCE

Let’s assume there are centuries down the line. What follows for living human logic as the space left open? We can say that a full calculation of the status of life will take place as an open mature mathematics of light. There is no reason to presume tractability any less mysterious than intractability, or that something simpler than simplicity is more impossible than anything else.

Simone Weil depicts intelligence as capture, auto-exploitation, limit; as that which first phase angelicism might have called ‘being a retard’:

If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Weil shows little to no awareness of the fact that the human always forgets what it has just learned—and yet she is still right about the stupidity of the most intelligent people on earth. Whole lifetimes can be passed in omnilapse (living and dying in error), and yet it seems even more true that lifetimes pass in this state no matter what we say or do. And this lands us in a final, exasperatedly teleologically theotropic crash-space.