Entropology

Entropology

Copyright © 2023 by Louis Armand

ISBN 978-1-312-28238-4

First Anti-Oedipal Ebook Edition, September 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. Published in the United States of America by Anti-Oedipus Press, an imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Cover Design by Interior Ministry

Interior Layout by D. Harlan Wilson

Twitter: @AntiOedipusP

IG: @antioedipuspress

ANTI-OEDIPUS PRESS

www.anti-oedipuspress.com

BOOKS BY LOUIS ARMAND

Fiction

Glitchhead

Descartes’ Dog

Hotel Palenque

Vampyr

The Garden

Gagarin

GlassHouse

The Combinations

Abacus

Cairo

Canicule

Breakfast at Midnight

Clair Obscur

Theory

Feasts of Unrule

Videology

Helixtrolysis

The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey

Event States

Literate Technologies

Solicitations

Incendiary Devices

Techne

Edited

Avant-Post

Language Systems

Contemporary Poetics

Technicity (with Arthur Bradley)

City Primeval (with Robert Carrithers)

Pornotopias (with Jane Lewty & Andrew Mitchell)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Culture is both a discourse of power & a locus of complexity (strange attractor), both ideological & logistic, determinate & emergent.

While the present volume continues an investigation of complex systems, entropy, de-evolution, cybernetics & the discourse of power that dates back to the mid-1990s, it is also a response to Wolfgang Iser’s 2008 Prague lecture, Culture, a Recursive Process, shaped by a series of discussions at Konstanz University on the subject of Culture & Crisis. As the line of argument developed in Entropology should make abundantly clear, our positions remained fundamentally divergent despite some points of agreement.

For Iser, cultural theory, while naming its object, had been unable to define it, to say what it is. Iser considered this anomalous: a discourse confounded by/with its object. It represented an utter failure of epistemology, engendered by the dilemma posed by entropy to anthropology (Lévi-Strauss). Attempting to rectify this, Iser turned towards cybernetic models of dynamic systems, recursivity & chaos.

In Iser’s last work, a certain project of recuperation became evident: to situate culture as the episteme of a discourse that both deconstructed & re-founded epistemological thought. It was obviously doubtful that any attempt at incorporating complexity & indeterminacy into a formal epistemological framework could resolve the problem of the whatness of culture & its definitional crisis – a problem that was itself the product of such a hermeneutic.

The question of culture, being in some sense exemplary of this problematic, was then re-orientated from a relation of crisis to a condition of crisis (the crisis of epistemology). Culture was not supposed to become thinkable merely in terms of some reduced, abstracted form, as an artefact of power (Balibar, Luhman), but rather as a dynamic structuration: form as active emergence & not as a passive backdrop of social history (Lefebvre). Crisis would be that dynamic tension through which emergence occurred; catastrophe would be its evolutionary engine, propagated by resonance, patterned by interference.

Yet such emergence could only occur at the very limits of knowledge – of the unknowable. Moreover, its conditions would be universal: an apparent paradox, in which the status of culture (technē) would become indistinguishable from that of a general ecology (physis, poiēsis). This rapport between the so-called living & non-living was determined by an underlying entropement or différance (Derrida), arising spontaneously & continuously just as fluctuations in the quantum field amplify into a quasi-infinite array of dissipative structures: the work of entropy. The internal logistics of this array – & the signifying (intelligent) environments that co-evolve with it – are the domain of culture.

In addition to the dialogue with the late Wolfgang Iser, the author also wishes to thank David Vichnar, Vít Bohal, Dustin Breitling, Diffractions Collective, Interior Ministry, Guillaume Collett, Germán Sierra, Márk Horváth, Adam Lovasz, Bogna Konior, Amy Ireland, Robin Mackay, Michael Uhall, Martin Procházka & D. Harlan Wilson for their critical interactions.

Sections of this book originally appeared in AI & Society, La Deleuziana, Litteraria Pragensia, Alienist, Sci Phi Journal, CounterText, Diffractions Collective, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, Trans*Migrations, Technicity & Speculative Ecologies: Plotting through the Mesh.

Research for this book was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project Creativity & Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World.

CONTENTS

[ENTRE/POLITY]

CATASTROPHE PRAXIS

Precognitions • Covidology • Omega Men • Fetish • Automatic Revolution • Spectres • M’aidez • Procurement • Survival • Trickledown • Global Minimum • Entropocene • Thing • Crisis Epidemic • Entropophagy

APRÈS LE FUTUR ... SIX PROPOSITIONS ON THE ENDS OF MODERNITY

THE POSTHUMAN ABSTRACT

Posthuman, All Too Humxn • Escape Velocity Zero • Dronology • The Return of Ideological Science

ENTROPOLOGY

Anthropocene, or, the Historical Mission of Capital • Entropy Is the Meaning of the Real • Dissipative Strictures • Negentropic Debt • Ideo-Metabolic Production • Exosomatism • The Instrumental Unconscious • Structure’s Dream • Entropy’s Inorganic Body • Techno-teleology • Xenocapitalism, or, The Jouissance of In/completion

THE TERATOLOGISTS

Scenarios of the Real • War of the Worlds • Did Judas Iscariot Have Godzilla on His Side? • Ultrashock, or, A Brighter Tomorrow

ALTERNATIVE THREE

Science Fiction in the Expanded Field • Realism is the Dream-Life of Tax Collectors • World as Will & Ideology • Cinema / Time-War • The Truth in Fiction • Irrational Counterparts • Another End-of-History Is Possible • Anthropocenic Vistas • The Future of a Disaster • Eschatologistics

THE END-OF-THE-WORLD IS NECESSARY – PROGRESS IMPLIES IT

Unseeing is Believing • Mutually Assured Delusion • Dawn of the Undeeded • Alien Covenants

RE-EVOLUTIONARY ABORT

The Criterion that Revolutionary Knowledge Must Become Power • Categorical Imperatives • The Impossible Raised to the Level of a Revolutionary Criterion • The Machinic Vision Splendid • Epistemic Catastrophism • From Revolution to Phantasmatic Re-Production

DISPATCHES FROM THE EVENT-HORIZON

Patching Holes in the Escape Pod • The End Always Comes Before Its Time • Groundwork for Zero Gravity • The Weird & the Global • From Revolution to Ricorso

TRANS/MORPHIC

Absolute Language • Turing Patterns • Mythopoetics • Hysteresis • Alien Entities • Resonance

XENOTEXT

Life: The Perfect Malware • Logos Cast upon the Void • Alien Wor(l)ds

NOTES

[ENTRE/POLITY]

All systems are ideological.

A system is defined by a set of operations that produce or maintain a type of pragmatic fiction called a state (i.e., a form or identification). A state defines a set of permitted operational/discursive bounds. Beyond these bounds, the system either breaks down or evolves into something else. The dynamics of a system are thus valorised with regard to such constraints. What cybernetics calls positive feedback promotes the idea of sustainability or growth of a system. Negative feedback causes it to decohere. But these are metaphors. To speak of positive feedback is ultimately as nonsensical as speaking of positive evolution – it imports an ideological element under the guise of system dynamics. Decoherence produces growth & vice versa. In so doing, these apparently homeostatic interactions affect within the system an idea-of-itself so that it isn’t solely metaphorical to say that a system possesses a degree of self-consciousness. Produced by the relation of the system-in-abstract to the collective effect of its operations, such a self-consciousness is also a political economy.

The complexity of a system evolves in relation to the elasticity of its constraints & its generative capacity for self-contradiction. What determines the ideological tendency for systems to emerge in the first place is entropy. Coherence isn’t the antithesis of entropy. It is the systematisation of entropy’s capacity to increase, to maintain a dynamic interval or difference, to affect a leading edge by which expenditure predicates productivity & circulation predicates value – even in the apparently fantastical form of the perpetuum mobile or eternal return (a time crystal for example doesn’t violate entropy, it is a phase of matter correlating to the operations of entropy itself, a phase out-of-equilibrium that nonetheless is both stable & evolutionary – whereas blockchains can be defined as syntropic or entropy traps). The formal expression of these self-contradictory relations is ideology. Likewise, the entropological conception of form is not a species of fixed capital, but technē (i.e., generative constraint). Entropy is technopoiēsis.

When an existing system is overstressed, new systems of dissipation (i.e., expenditure) emerge. The self-expression of a given system can equally bring about a crisis in its apparent singularity, the fact being that its form isn’t merely relative but is a product of relativity. It is just as meaningless to speak of fixed capital as it is to speak of a crisis of overproduction. By definition, every system overproduces itself, & every system exists in a state of inchoate crisis. In this respect, the self-consciousness of a system corresponds to its self-identity in nomenclature only: all systems that do not decohere can be said to evolve into themselves (the narcissism, as Freud said, of small differences). There is no such thing as a conservation of value. Whatever identities become attached to a given system – be they informatic, biological, social, economic, or political – are historically nominal (& thus anomalous) terms, designating what is an event-state or state-in-flux. The ideological nexus of cognition, capital & culture is also their respective content.

If entropy defines a balance of power (e.g., the relation of a system to a motive force: that-which-makes-possible as much as that-which-permits), it is to the extent that it is simultaneously the remittance of power (not seduced, but constituted, by its own decadence). This is what Bataille called the accursèd share: that which, within a system of identity, of self-conscious reason, would correspond to the occluded episteme, both the unknowable & unthinkable, in effect the impossible. The balance-of-power only appears to be the inverse of that tipping point where possibility emerges into a system. This isn’t equivalent to reason’s necessary self-contradictoriness evaluated dialectically as a special capacity to transcend the limits of a kind of thought which fails to rise above the level of the understanding, as Gadamer has said of Kant. Entropy doesn’t precomprehend reason. It produces the possibility of reason out of an irreducible difference.

The horizon of transcendence is the spectre haunting every totalising movement. Behind reason’s special capacity is the libidinal force of entropy. Bataille called it expenditure without reserve; Kant called it the sublime. Entropy nevertheless ends up devolving upon an image, an aesthetics of the impossible. The greater its dissipative potential, the more a system dreams of autonomous action: the reduction of entropy. In its dream of transcendence, doesn’t entropy achieve self-consciousness? By way of chance & complexity, the very thing that evolves isn’t the apparent proliferation of forms or systems, but an originary difference (Derrida) for which all these are in effect the vehicle, so to speak, without conveying anything as such. In this movement of self-maximisation, what is entropy’s accursèd share? At what critical point does its own movement decohere & break time-translation symmetry? In what medium resides its apparent irrecuperability? What medium transmits its force?

Beyond the confines of one specialist discourse or another, the central question here is what is named by the term entropy? What, in this work or action of naming, is entroped by & within the very phenomenon that the term entropy presumes to designate – as if this phenomenon, objectified & abstracted from a universal condition, were not the opening-of-possibility of designation in the first place & of the form of the question?

Prague, August 2021

CATASTROPHE PRAXIS

Nietzsche’s account of the eternal return presupposes a critique of the terminal or equilibrium state. Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained & that therefore an equilibrium of forces is not possible.

– Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy

Precognitions. There are certain things as if known in advance: the world will end, death is inevitable, nothing lasts (forever), etc. Yet all of these are posed against a background of absolute nonknowledge: the meaning of forever, of endlessness, of nothing, of death & therefore of life. They are, in effect, figures of speech, if not metaphors: the constructed verism of the profoundly unknowable, lying somewhere upon the further shore of a present bounded by catastrophe. But catastrophe is a black box in which the rationality of the knowable, the predictable, the modellable breaks down. What good is it to confront ecological collapse armed with a survivalist handbook if the climate patterns that have so far defined the idea of a biosphere cease to exist? What use is an immunological corporate-state enterprise when the accelerated form, force & frequency of viral pandemics reduces its system of control to an epistemological precariat? And what type of theoretical fictions do we inhabit when we pretend that catastrophe itself will permit a transitional phase of human social re-becoming (homo catastrophicus)? What do we do when it behaves as nothing more than a dialectical figure beholden to the rules of a critical discourse that is infatuated with the idea of its own futurity? At a time when the language of revolution has undergone an almost complete rehabilitation, the thought that travels abroad under its name nevertheless does so in the pay of a radical conservatism: from the conservation of the planet, to the conservation of the human, to the conservation of a culture of consumption, capital & crisis. (Though the world is moribund, the spectacle of its end has never been more productive. Conservation is nothing if not a mode of perpetuated ending, of an ending-in-abeyance or in-abyss.) Yet none of this violates the fundamental logic of these discourses, which have secretly known this all along & which exist to conserve this secret: not the secret of any thing, nor a conspiracy among things kept from the world, but the knowledge assiduously kept from itself – its unknown-known. Broadly speaking, the discourse of humanism (including all the forms of anti- & post-humanism) isn’t the consciousness of this catastrophism, but the contrary.

Covidology. From the moment COVID-19 entered the western consciousness, it became a phenomenon. This phenomenon was characterised by two dominant modes: PANIC (that the virus posed an existential threat to the existing world order) & DENIAL (that the virus didn’t really exist at all). But there is also a more subtle characteristic, which has largely gone unacknowledged, between the instantaneously known, the unknown, the unknowable & the unavowable. There has been no shortage of observations to the effect that COVID is as much a product of late capital as it is a force of nature, that it is ideological as much as it is biological, & that it is anthropocenic par excellence. Like the Anthropocene – a term meant to designate both an objective geological register & the accumulation of capital effects into an autonomous geo-technology – the phenomenon of COVID marks a confusion between the idea of an objectifiable thing (virus) & an alien force (pandemic) capable of bringing about a kind of automatic revolution independent of (yet parasitic upon) collective human agency. Like the Anthropocene, the phenomenon of COVID-19 has renewed a certain apocalyptic tone in contemporary discourse, which sees in it an instrument of radical upheaval, a catalyst of world-transformation, an irresistible acceleration of THE END of the status quo, of the regime of global capital & (as always) of history. The purview of this End of History has produced a vertiginous anachronism at the heart of all these covidologies. No sooner had COVID presented itself as a fait accompli than it availed itself of a compulsive historicisation. Before virtually anything at all was really known about the novel coronavirus spreading across the planet, mouthpieces everywhere simultaneously proclaimed the return to a New Normal & the advent of a post-catastrophe World Order unlike any that had gone before.

Omega Men. Viewed retrospectively, the timeline in which the first major financial stimulus packages were announced (to assist economies in their recovery from the COVID-19 crisis or mitigate its impact) appears to have been a phenomenon in itself, occupying a temporality both after the fact & hyperstitionally in advance of it. It wasn’t simply that governments & financial institutions sought to shore up their own futures by treating the pandemic as ostensibly over before it had really begun (& thus purchasing the political-economic conditions for the continuation of the status quo). Nor was it that this convulsive routine of economic stimulus was a kind of primal reflex in the face of potentially catastrophic uncertainty (& not merely a routine formalism). Rather, what this temporality of responses brings into view are the operations of a certain regime of anachronism at work in the control of reality, the end of which is always-already its beginning (the dialectics of power). Within two months of introducing financial stimulus into their economies, beginning in March 2020, it is estimated that world governments collectively spent more on COVID – over $10 trillion USD – than during the entire 2008 Global Financial Crisis, driving global debt to unprecedented levels (in the first nine months of 2020, global debt rose by $19.3 trillion). These are not simply ritualistic gestures to conjure a virus out of existence, but a ruthless struggle on the part of capital to foreclose on the possibility of its own end & erase the idea of that possibility. How is it that this revolutionary struggle is largely invisible within a critical discourse that is instead preoccupied with transcendental utopias & street protests with no prospect of a seizure of power?

Fetish. On 11 March, the Director General of the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. On the 24th of the same month, Slavoj Žižek, ever ready to preach from the mount, published a book entitled Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World.¹ A month earlier, in the course of Europe’s inaugural (& most intensive) lockdown, Giorgio Agamben published the first of many denunciations of the new dictatorship of telematics entitled The Invention of an Epidemic.² In it, he lamented the reduction of social existence to bare life under a biopolitical state of exception. Armed with a reactionary non-knowledge, Agamben’s instant humanist sentimentality isn’t the discipline of a defence of life, but its subsumption into an act of liberal self-gratification. The denunciations that followed (e.g., Requiem for the Students³) are all the more remarkable for the fact that their primary motivation stems from a threat to academic lifestyle. The Socratic system of political education in which Agamben’s privileged position had been assured – even in the twenty-first century – was yet again being harassed by that most Platonic of nemeses: technē (in the by-now trivial form of a digital interface). The relative folly of Žižek & Agamben’s interventions exposes the extent to which the production of critical fetish objects has come to manifest the same cultural & economic forms as those it pretends to critique. What Žižek & Agamben have not been willing to examine is, to rephrase Bourdieu, the entire set of social mechanisms that make possible the figure of the public intellectual – even, or especially, in these apparently anti-intellectual times – as the producer of that fetish called critique.⁴ In other words, while claiming a unique cultural authority to direct the way the COVID pandemic is being critically thought & thereby known, they elide the constitution of the a field that serves as the locus where the belief in the value of critique is produced & reproduced in the first