by Chris Shaw | orginally published at Collapse Patchworks

Modernity, equality and democracy are viruses, parasitical assemblages atop a decaying civilisational corpse. Their corollaries of identity and universality are appendages that give a veneer of control, an idea of integrable destiny commonly referred to as humanity. This moves beyond the realms of politics or conspiracy, down to ontological potentiality and the constituted facts of being. Projects of posthumanism or the decentring of agency still grasp at the universality of a milieu.

Collapse does not figure as part of the potentiality of being. Technological acceleration or the exponential expansion of superintelligence are encompassed by the conceptualisation of a thingness, in Latour’s Parliament of Things[1] or STS’s idea of scientific stakeholdership. The fetters of parliamentarism reinstate the universality of a constructive project within the agon. Antagonisms of class and axioms are treated as reconcilable and equitable. Agonism entails the capability to forever resolve conflict. What of the irresolvable conflict? Separation and violence then sit beneath the agon as actualisations beyond praxis.

Jane Bennett’s vital materialism[2] follows this utopian line, suggesting the integration of the being of thingness (and the decentring of sapient agency) is a process of assemblage. By expanding the definitions of agency to include forces and techniques, the underlying assumption is open-ended in what can be included and how beings and things integrate themselves. Through this, a more holistic form of governmentality can emerge that appreciates the relationships between them.

Anthropomorphistic explanations place human concerns at the top of a hierarchy. Obversely, vital materialism suggests an equitability between concerns and practices, such that the formation of policies and the construction of assemblages entails a wider set of beings to be considered. But what does such a polity look like? When integrating a holistic collective being, what is prioritised? What is subsidiarised? Who represents what? The whole question of representation re-establishes sapient reasoning as the method of debate and decision.

It also ignores Adorno’s sublimation of the concept that Bennett cites in the first chapter. In creating the concept, a delineation occurs whereby the outside of the concept is deconceptualised. Creation begets destruction (or at least deconstruction). This is comparable to Derrida’s trace, as the mark of the non-present. How does the trace become parliamentarised, other than as a tokenistic gesture toward the unknowable? The limits of construction come up against the excluded other, the deconstructed other that agency and being occlude.

“Rather than a clean break between the human and posthuman, which would mean that the ‘post’ human would be unrecognizably ‘other’, the teleological progression for some dominant versions of posthumanism justifies a belief that humans will both transcend themselves while remaining the same”[3]. Agency never collapses, never ends. It re-emerges in a new guise, as a computerised array, the uploading of consciousness to the cloud. But in so doing, new traces also emerge, showing the fragility of these (already) aleatory potentials. Deconstruction is never singular, being contextual and thus multiplicitous. The same belies constructions in that their occluded other is always present in its non-presence. “Global thinking, even in its scientific and seemingly universalist claims to an atmosphere that ‘we’ all share, belies the geopolitics that enlivens scientific concern, as well as the global public policy agenda of geoengineering that seeks to act on behalf of it”[4]. Beyond geopolitics, globality as a synonym of humanity assumes a collective agency at work, a shared destiny through which the project of being always leads towards.

Destiny is key. The conceptualisation of being, whether inclusive or exclusive, requires a destination to escape perpetual becoming and elevate reason or emotion as the driver of agentic possibility. Agency’s telos is that of full knowledge, the encoding of the knowable and its delineation in a system(s) of facticity. To mark the outside as no longer such, or to attempt to face the real in Lacanian terms. But there is no real. These are themselves constructions of the same facticity. The real is impossible, yet still knowable. We can never face it, yet it is described and allocated.

Reality is a question of observation, of the perspective of the entity asking the question. “Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits”[5]. Who asks the question, and are the multitudinous answers recognisable or reconcilable? We return to antagonisms as the limits of being. The equity of answers cannot be posited other than as an ideal, another destiny to strive toward. Wheeler elucidates as much when the validity of measurement, of observation, is provided by the community applying its “tests of credibility”.

What is our destiny? To perpetually ask and answer? To think the thought provoking?[6] Heidegger’s invocation relies on the constitution of institutions that can facilitate such. “Yet man is not capable of really thinking as long as that which must be thought about, withdraws”[7]. The it from bit of Wheeler thus is not thought, but simply a binary mechanism of delineating reality. From constructivism to enclosure. However, it reveals the limitations of agency to confront the facts. The facts being that universal particles are entities influenced by what we perceive; that facticity is forever limited as a universal explanator; that knowledge itself begets the trace of its unknown; that our space-time and cause-effect relations are merely useful factishes[8] brandished to create understanding. Facts are factishes.

Opening up agency becomes a paradox. To open it up, make it multi-perspectival, is to further foreclose or binarise the techniques available. Further yes-no questions but from other intelligences. This will always be liminal and contingent, knowledge-as-limitation but also as always-present. This isn’t escapable. We are all constructed by physico-chemical drives, cultural milieux and survival instincts. By “gradations of rank” and the potential of free spirits. “As adventurers and circumnavigators of the inner world called ‘man,’ as surveyors of all the ‘higher’ and the ‘one-above-another,’ also called ‘man’—penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, rejecting nothing, losing nothing, tasting everything, cleansing everything from all that is accidental, and, as it were, sifting it out”[9].

Escaping into the chaos of being. Praxis is overrated, overdetermined by accelerating techonomic forces and the drives of climatology and heat-death. Projects of national renewal, of the reassertion of a homogeneous identity will always find themselves in a swirling milieu of concatenations and conflicts. But this should not be rejected in favour of the agonistic parliament, a naïve attempt to control axiomatic warfare and homogenise everything into a globality. Violence is an underpinning drive of all social constructions, the everlasting tension of ontological extensions. Both internally, as the splitting of personality riven by contradictions and oppositions, and externally, as collective projects of renewal and their potential for failure and collapse.

This is destiny overridden by the irreducible conflict of potential. The forever-extension of yes-no questions into a constantly evolving manifold of perspectival tensions. Violence and conflict are not destinations, but membranes through which our constructions and deconstructions filter into the chaos of the unknown. To formulate the opening of being, collapse must hang over it as an always-present. Violence then is risk, to risk a lifeworld and to extend the will precipitously.

“It is the condition and insistence of modification and change, each modification confronting the possibility of multiple directions, trajectories, lines of flight, new practices, and experiments”[10]. Through fluctuations and bifurcations, conflicting and combining with those other drives, those other conceptualisations as well as thinking the unthinkable, thinking of the non-conceptual other as another possibility of the will. But beneath this is also the agency of collapse itself, of the drives toward pure destruction and disorder. Inverting the conspiracies and striking through blind terror.

Agentic collapse is anti-humanistic. To collapse being is to destroy personality and identity, schizo-driving and undetermining fixed conceptions of who we are, what we are capable of and where we are going. Future collapsing into the present. Reality is constructed, so let us continue producing fictions, new systems of control and their corollaries and obverses. We become confronted with bare life, life as mere survival in the face of war and apocalypse. This is what the carnivalesque really means, the upending of social relations. Creative destruction writ large, in pogroms and camps. Totalitarianism of the spirit within the gradations of rank. But also retreat into pure thought, escaping the cloistering of praxis and sociopolitical action. From universal assemblages to particularised patchworks[11].

Bendell conceives of deep adaptation to climate change as “the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances so as to survive with valued norms and behaviours”[12]. Yet we return to the same paradox of being, the attempt to encompass value conflicts in the neutral agon. But neutrality is an ideological position, one increasingly defined by exclusive expertise and the methodenstreit. Knowledge is very far from the University of Disaster[13], instead further dividing the intellectual division of labour.

Climate change is anthropomorphism writ large. Human-centric concerns are paramount in how we conceive the need to be resilient, be able to relinquish, restore and reconcile. Why? Industrial heat-death continues at full pace in America, China and India. Energy intensity becomes a yardstick for civilisational progress. Reconciliation becomes another humanist doctrine, to accept climate refugees and maintain the flows of globalisation and openness in the face of catastrophe. “If we allow ourselves to accept that a climate-induced form of economic and societal collapse is now likely, then we can begin to explore the nature and likelihood of that collapse”. “Some frame the future as involving a collapse of this economic and social system, which does not necessarily mean a complete collapse of law, order, identity and values”. “Some analysts emphasise the unpredictable and catastrophic nature of this collapse, so that it will not be possible to plan a way to transition at either collective or small-scale levels to a new way of life that we might imagine as tolerable, let alone beautiful. Then others go further still and argue that the data can be interpreted as indicating climate change is now in a runaway pattern”[14].

No matter how bad it gets, we’ll still have our cherished values. We say this in a world where brutal violence is ubiquitous, where political conflict becomes terrorism. Values are defined by power, the power to wield forces and forms of violence against enemies. If Bendell’s predictions are correct, values will become a secondary consideration. In a society that wants to universalise de-risking and quell conflict, the presence of desperate circumstances will create a world of warlords and monsters if it means pockets of order in a chaotic, increasingly uninhabitable planet.

Here is the edge case of agentic collapse, of the reduction of ideologies and values in the face of uncontrollable drives and monstrous agencies borne from inaction and runaway feedback loops. Humanism is a retreat, a veil over which is masked the necessary violence required to hold the line between order and disorder. But it is also the means to prevent creation, to limit construction toward the anointed. To prevent the dispersion of power. It is a sick irony that collapse and destruction beget creation and diffusion.

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[1] Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II

[2] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

[3] https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/animal-human-differences-the-deconstructive-force-of-posthumanism

[4] Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology

[5] https://philarchive.org/rec/WHEIPQ

[6] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

[7] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

[8] Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I

[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[10] Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology

[11] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2020/12/23/collapse-patchworks-a-theory/

[12] https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

[13] Paul Virilio, Grey Ecology

[14] https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf