“Emancipation is for us the meaning of nihilism.” – Gianni Vattimo
What comes after nihilism? This question might seem impertinent given the actual state and trajectory of things. Everywhere traditional, reactionary, and localising ideologies compete, conflict and continue colonising and recolonising the discursive terrains of our political and personal lives. This scattered and unevenly distributed field of actualisation has made it increasingly difficult to maintain semblances of coherence at all levels. How then can we claim to grasp what comes after nihilism while our cultural-subjective fields are still littered by the decaying corpses of quasi-religious, religious and secular-romantic narratives that had previously promised us much but are delivering very little? Have we even begun to evacuate the spaces of reasoning which have led our species to the brink of social disintegration and ecological collapse? How can we be beyond something not yet fully actualised?
Despite the seeming lag in understanding our contemporary disarray, recent events – from the 2008 financial crash, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and the intensification of global climate change, to the ongoing international acquiescence of Israel’s occupation and destruction of Gazan communities, and the handling of protesters in Ferguson, Missouri – have demonstrated the hollowness of even our most cherished and guiding Western sentiments about democracy, justice, human progress. Instead we have entered a phase in which the cultural-subjective condition of nihilism has exploded beyond any local philosophical manifestation to become the objective condition of the world.
Simultaneously, the hardly digested lessons of our sciences are leading in the direction of the realisation of the ultimate purposelessness of existence. Successive discoveries from Darwinism, the heat death of the universe, artificial intelligence and the limitations of human cognition, to the demotion of introspective and phenomenological accounts of the world to second-string players.
If nihilism is in large part an unraveling of traditional structures of meaning, accompanied by the collapse of certainty, then scientific suggestions about the limits of human “knowability” and its supporting unconscious operations can only serve to intensify the nihilistic tendency. Meaning, value, truth, agency, and consciousness are being exposed as ghost-objects dependent on imaginal associations, previously (mis)taken as ontological rather than functional singularities.
Even as we disentangle our brains and the secrets of cognition we begin to realise just how little we diverge from our most primitive animal cousins in basic functioning and perceptive prowess. We are not the ultimate purpose of creation we thought we were. And in many respects we can no longer claim to be ecologically necessary or special. Whether we look to ancestral pasts or posthuman futures we are confronted with the same seemingly terrible lesson: it has all been for nothing. We were not intended, and we may not even survive the next 100 years. Wherever we scramble for reassuring fragments of meaning being imbued in the fabric of the cosmos we are confronted with just-so stories that we cling to despite having seen them evaporate like the oceans of the future beneath an exploding sun.
It is therefore tempting to answer that what comes after nihilism is sadness. The transcendental nature of norms and values has been scorched; our rationality has been shown to be ridden with biases, systemic errors, and, as is beginning to be made painfully clear, is probably a functional delusion. It may be that this is partly why we see so much depression and anxiety today: by turning these affective relations to corrosive truth into pathologies, the denial allows the rest of us to go on. But to ask what comes after is also to ask: what remains?
The world after nihilism is populous. What rests beneath our zombie delusions and mythologies are countless sensuous bodies. What is revealed is a world composed of material entities in energetic interactions that exist within a vast mesh of ecological metabolism. Bodies jostle and exchange in, against, across and through one another in what we could conceive as transcorporeal (‘across-body’). What is of value in this view is that while our cognitions are unreliable, shot through with myth-making, we nonetheless have our embodied sapience, the wisdom of bodies that are practically engaged in a world structured and coordinated by and as assemblages of other bodies.
The term transcorporeality is borrowed from feminist materialist philosopher Stacey Alaimo and is intended to help us frame the way the world is, to provide us with an ontology. Transcorporeal reality assembles all bodies as intimately implicated with one another such that the possibility of embodied contact between things, flows, relations and excitations – whether they are human or inhuman, geological or machine, animal or informational – remains the natural condition. The philosophical question of whether we can know reality ‘in itself’ is no longer our concern: materially and consequentially we are always already in corporeal contact with the real, even if our phenomenal experience and cognitive systems can never do justice to that contact.
In such a world bodies are thus choreographed activities rather than static objects, and they are always open to and composed of one another’s activities. Your body is in part the expression of genes and their organic machine code, a morphology that has responded to natural and urban environmental pressures and a responsive pragmatic necessity, foreign bacteria, climatic conditions, the sun, as well as a host of other bodies of both microscopic and cosmic scales. They are rhythmic compositions that synchronise and become dissonant, penetrate and are penetrated, embedded in and emerging from the crowded complexity of hot and cold tempos, conducts, demands, and needs. They are as much spaces and habitats as they are spaced and inhabiting. Above all, this means they are plastic and vulnerable.
After nihilism, then, are embodied realisations of and exposures to vibrant ecologies of being offering an ultimately untameable wilderness which we participate in on an equal footing with all other bodies, even if we have an unequal ecological effect. In order to cope-with and cope-within the wilderness of being we must abandon the charnel-house of meaning and its theological tyrannies once and for all. As coping-beings we must leave our reifications behind in order to engage in post-nihilist praxis: an ecologistics of tracing these rhythms and activities, their multiple couplings and decouplings, and taking responsibility for our way of cohabiting in, with and alongside other bodies.
Such a mutant pragmatism also recognises the practicality of cultivating a carnal ethics and corporal politics of vulnerable bodies capable of abandoning all essentialisms, all magical thinking, and to attend to the naked, porous materiality of the world. The death of God is a profound liberation; this sadness is the mourning for a ruined world we must leave behind. We are Nietzsche’s bastards.
We have suffered so much talk of ‘living in the end times’ with its paralysis of thought and action. Post-nihilist praxis refuses the sadness of nihilism along with the myopic comforts of pre-Catastrophic ideological certainties. We have already lived through the collapse of conditions for possibility of certainty, what R. Scott Bakker calls “the semantic apocalypse”, and the ecological collapse has already begun: in this sense we are already living after the end of the world. And so amid the ongoing debates on how to resuscitate a disintegrating world that refuses to die we begin to sift through the ruins – as it is only from the ruins that we can rebuild.
WRITTEN BY ARRAN CRAWFORD & MICHAEL JAMES
PUBLISHED IN Occupied Times of London #26 // Apocalypse Now? OCTOBER 18, 2014
* This is only a sketch of what a post-nihilist praxis might consist. The post-nihilist tendency remains less a worked out position as it is a point of taking-leave. Variations of this tendency continue to be generated. (See, for example, the Out of the Woods Collective who have independently concretised the demand for a post-nihilist praxis in their discussion of the tactics and strategies of ‘Disaster Communism‘ – an ecological politics that shares a family resemblance with our own position. Or the Dark Mountain Project focusing on “cultural responses to an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling”.)
synthetic zerØ 
did this get the kinds of responses that you guys were hoping for?
I’m not sure I was hoping for any response in particular…
If anything I would like discussions to revolve around a number of key issues:
1) the deflation of human phantasy – via investigation into the inherent limits of human cognition, and including facilitating cultural/popular acknowledgement of and working with tendencies towards bias, reification, and dogma/ideology (as well as the role of evolved affective neuro-circuitry; fear, loss-aversion, etc.)
2) the subsequent reframing human sapience and social activities in accordance with working sets of modified scientific/materialist images and discourse.
3) exploring possibilities for radicalizations of local to global politics in relation to infrastructural change (inclusive of human habitation, water and food access, energy use, and population vulnerabilities) and adaptation to the ongoing and intensifying combined and uneven eco-social “disasters”.
4) a reinvigoration of materialist praxis (ecologistics) – via increased appreciated for the material and ecological dynamics (transcorporeal causal relations) that drive, influence and structure action and behavior, and masked by ideology.
5) accumulation of strategies for survival, mitigation and adaptation to civilizational collapse, social unrest, and ecological catastrophe.
Are there more? I’m sure there are.
What say you Dirk? Do you have any constructive redirections re: the article? Our project? The whole post-nihil sentiment? Reactions..
hey michael, nothing new strikes me since we went back and forth about the pre-publication, poor andy pickering (who as you know has a very similar project) in that recent talk i just posted says he feels like his work puts him in outer-space (not on the same planet as the moral majority) and i can relate so was wondering if the format of this piece connected with folks and if so how.
It’s been all positive feedback so far, but not much by way of discussion. There will be strong resistance to the kinds of cognitive results nihilism can produce – since everything hitherto in our culture has been catered to have people safe-guard their habituated semantic-complexes (cognitive habits of association). From the institutionalizing effects of Religion, to the smooth functional delivery of consumer choice massaged by capitalist systems, human phantasy shows no signs of slowing its colonization of the Real.
And without axiomatic negation (nihilism as an adopted cognitive event) there can be no sense-able ecological praxis – no deflationary reflection on vibrant bodies. People have not suffered enough (apparently) to have done with the judgment of God.
Tell Pickering he can come join us here if he wants to amplify the ecologistic resonance machines.
glad it was well received as it was well written, one never knows before hand how these things will fly. haven’t had much luck in the past luring andy into the blogosphere but will certainly keep him in the loop as we make our ways going forward.
Wonderful piece. I love the continental gothic tone! You actually acknowledge the boggling dimensions of the problem, which sets it apart. People need to understand how the information tsunami is just getting started, and that all traditional verities, even those that style themselves as radical, are going to be roundly recontextualized – out of existence if history is to be any guide. For me (1) and (2) are the crux of the matter. The problem really consists in getting to (3) without having first settled (1) and (2). (4) and (5) are important, but as speculative horizons, primarily.
(1) is the critical project of dismantling noocentrism, something required to block the abductive exits. (2) is the positive project of reconceiving the human in post-intentional terms. As it happens, the science continues to leap ahead the philosophy, and there’s a number of radical reconceptualizations out there.
(3) for me is the Holy Grail. The governance of life goes on regardless, but what consequence does understanding the nature of that governance hold for governance? I just don’t know how to get there yet, but I feel I’ve travelled far enough down (1) and (2) to begin making some preliminary guesses. You need (1) to motivate the defection from (what seems) commonsense intuition. You need (2) because you need an alternate account of human nature.
(3) aims to provide a theoretical groundwork for a post-intentional ethics/politics – this is arguably the biggest theoretical challenge facing humanity. It seems clear to me at least that our conduct-governing systems are heuristic, adapted to solve in the absence of the very information the sciences of the human are producing. But what does this mean? This is where we line up our guesses and debate their relative merits, always remembering that, empirically speaking, anything could be the case. We could be totally fucked, but we might not be.
So although I definitely appreciate the resignation in your concluding tone, it serves to remember it remains an open question.
I was pressed pretty hard on this in that Scientia Salon piece. I still think we’re likely screwed, but…
“The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on its shroud”
– J.G. Ballard
Hello Scott,
Thanks for the encouragement. Reading it now I cringe at how it flows (or doesn’t) thematically. I think we tried to pack too much into our sentences at the expense of readability.
I agree re: recontextualization. Even the keenest among seem ill-equipped to cognitively cope with the realities we inhabit. The future might grind us all up in its informational-material gears. As I indicated to Arran above I think we are going to need a radical reformation in infrastructure (broadly conceived) to be able to accommodate intensifying changes in human and non-human systems.
As far as 1# and #2 I think it’s a race against ‘time’, in the sense that education and a cultural diffusion of scientific images of humanity might occur at a rate that prevents ecological disaster. “Dismantling noocentrism”, as you say, is hard business and may not be achieved without a massive humbling via the collapse of civilizational supports.
In terms of politics, check out what I wrote to Arran above. What I suggest there is my first attempt at a post-nihilist/post-intentional governance model.
And is collapse still an open question? I don’t see the wiggle room given recent climate models matched to stats on industrial/carbon outputs, not to mention factoring the processes at work in our financial ‘climate’, and the vulnerability of nuclear technologies as related to the coming anarchies..? From a scientific-empirical standpoint is collapse both semantic and civilizational avoidable at this point?
The thing is, I think about the past compared to now – seems like murder every five seconds. Murdering peasants when they uprise after being oppressed. Mass murder and rape after breaking into castles. Slavery, including sex slavery, all over the place.
And this was pretty much our richest belief point.
Is the existential angst perhaps felt on the matter really just a bunch of inner monsters, dying?
Is the real concern people have actually that all we have is a bunch of inner monsters? And they are all dying?
Callan,
I think the situation now is much darker. Not all of our ‘inner monsters’ or idols of mind/ Gods are dying. Certainly some ‘gods’ still loom large in the personal and social imaginaries of humans, and ideologies of all sorts still spread like so much disease online, in church, in the boardroom, etc. – affording various maladaptive circuits of disposition, kludged coherences and motivational sets which generate a variety of cultural performances. ISIS is a fascinating albeit sad example of idealist-based social expressions attempting to fill the void left by deconstructed social niches. And other fundamentalisms abound.
What we see as collapsing is the rational-empirical basis for justifying such Idols, ideologies and practices. The objective condition of the planet is thwarting all our attempts at doxa installation and rationalized stability. We are fucking up so bad that it becomes debilitatingly obvious just how ridiculous and confused we are as individuals and in groups.
As historical reflection suggests: Tribalism lead to genocide; traditionalism lead to the Inquisition; Modernism leads to ecological disaster, fascist organization and the WWs; technorationality leads to Fukushima; Post-modernism leads to consumer culture, etc., and so on. The very infrastructure that supports inflated discourse and “ism” games is unravelling.
So our question is: given the ruinous and calamitous state of human affairs, and the inherent limitation to our metacognitive reflexivity, what kinds of alternative cognitive, communicative, social and material practices can we now devise that will help us meet what seems to be a very precarious future?
Well, I think it needs to draw from the ink that is the progress on how much less we are murdering ourselves. Otherwise posts like yours seem to end up treating it as if there is only more consumer culture or more Fukishima, etc – ie, that that is all that is happening. Treating it that there are only problems being made. I suspect its actually a desire to just get back to a moralising – an attempt to avoid the subject that moralising failed to reduce killings (it increased them!) and something else reduced killings, not moralising. And the god of moralising doesn’t like that.
So moralising is going to have to enter discussion that includes frames where it failed and other processes suceeded. Without moralising going into self referencing rationalisation (“Those people deserved to die, so they don’t count against moralisings success! Why did they deserve it? Because…morals!”).
I mean really – genocide, inquisition…and consumer culture??? Why not list Hitler, Genghis Khan and that guy who sings off key on the bus while listening to his walkman? Does the third thing really fit with the other two?
On ‘ISIS’ that’s like calling a zombie by the name it had when it was actually alive. It’s a thing driven by the urge to hold severed heads by the skalp in front of a nokia phone, now. Looking on it as a sad example is like tut tut uncle Fred as he feeds on brains. There is no uncle Fred. ISIS is either the name you give the zombie, or it’s the name you let go of. I might be snapping at you over it, but from what I’ve seen, I can’t engage a sense of sadness about what is/was just an organisation.
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I got a great deal of reassurances from the post compared to what I perceive when I take a look around. The idea that all of creation was designed to make an ape is goofy when you look out at all of creation. We are one tiny step away from becoming feral savages when we need to be protective of what we cherish. But that feral savage needs to be there because we exist on a plant predicated on killing to survive. You kill and eat living foodstuff to survive, this is a savage world. Communities will never share, there is going to be atrocities because of Jealousy and Rage are a part of us. It is not gloomy to me, it is a challenge and some excitement at overcoming a savage world. There are going to be times when moving forward hurts someone and moving backwards hurts someone as well as not moving hurting someone else.
There is a saying that states two people can both be right and both have opposite opinions. Perspective is what we see and know to be right and wrong. It is personal to us as we all see things through our experiences.
I for one believe in creation. And by golly every scientists knows we were created, our planet was created and life was created by one particular thing. I like to question the idea that, to have something create us and call it a God…does that God have to be immortal or be the only God out there?
Callan,
There have no doubt been changes in social organization over time. And indeed some “progress” has been made, especially in technics and public civility, but i don’t know if that equates to drastic improvement in quality of life for the majority of the human species, considering the number of people living in abject poverty and the anomie, anxiety and sheer bordom many experience these days. And here I truly mean quality rather than quantity. There is mountains of ethnographic research that suggests most non-capitalist societies had much richer, intimate and meaningful lives before “progress” was jammed down their throats. I think its historically inaccurate to assume globalist civilization as it has played out thus far is an actual “advance” in modes of living as opposed to a non-valuative change.
Also, murder framed the way you want (as more or less random acts) has surely declined over time, but if you broaden your definition to include war do you still see a drastic decrease in the amount of corpses created by modern social systems? We could split hairs all over the place in this regard but for what result?
As it is with any reality things are never simple – so of course their has been ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’ when it comes to our current state of affairs. SO i’m not suggesting some singular development here (all bad news), only that the overall trajectory of civilization is leading towards collapse. Human populations and the social systems they enact have collapsed many times before [see Tainter 1988, Diamond 2005; LINK: http://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Tainter_Joseph_The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies.pdf%5D and our industrial-military-consumer complex will be no different given current ecological trends. In other words, there is nothing “moralizing” about acknowledging the material-energetic and ecological processes currently unfolding. Regardless of how any of us feel about any of this its still going to unfold primarily according to non-discursive dynamics. So lets deal with that.
And I agree: “moralising is going to have to enter discussion”. However, it is my contention that it enters in via a hyper-critical reappraisal of its efficacy and nature, and then a subsequent negation (ala nihilism) of its effects and operational role. Ethical deliberation is a matter of normative procedure in the context of collective action, whereas “moralizing” the reification of traditional-semantic valuation. The former is a praxis the latter is a pre-reflexive cognitive habit. But i digress.
You write: “I mean really – genocide, inquisition…and consumer culture??? Why not list Hitler, Genghis Khan and that guy who sings off key on the bus while listening to his walkman? Does the third thing really fit with the other two?”
Um, yeah it does. Consumer culture is a force of destruction (of deforestation, geological unsettling, desertification, climate change, mass species extinction, etc.) never seen on this planet before. Do you think the commodifcation and subsequent disruption of every natural ecosystem on this planet is a benign event???
Regardless of your analysis of ‘ISIS’ (which I think simplistically reduces a very complex situation) the fact remains that it has strong ideological aspects. Its tragic, brutal, disgusting, etc.,.. all that. Overall, what you call “just an organization” is still an actually existing assemblage that causes great harm regardless of its participants aspirations and disuse motivations, or how loose it hangs together.
Let me ask you this: is ‘ISIS’ or whatever you want to call it any different than the KKK or neo-nazis or The Shining Path (was) or Halliburton or BP in its aims of domination or its effect on living systems? The point is that ALL of these are/were assemblages of people and materials and discourse and practices seeking to influence and control various terrains, and post-nihilist praxis seeks to track the effects (and affects) and engage the distributed dynamics of situations beyond the ideologies and discourses they throw up, and without default reactionary reliance on the same second order abstractions and imaginaries that circulate as traditional political cultures.
(sorry if this comes off as offensive – it is a genuine question) but it seems like you are moralising here too, though… How can you claim to have passed through nihilism without having a personal crisis of valuation (in the nietzschean sense) – that is, how can you still hold on to these unreconstructed positive or negative valuations of Palestinians, or anti-cap, or racism, or brand logos, or consumer capitalism? On the truly nihilistic level all these things are as pure and innocent as each other. Why are extinction events bad? Or is this where the post-nihil begins? If so, then why does it look so similar to the species of mundane leftism we see everywhere?
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