Circle is the new Spiral

Our ahistoricism will be our unbecoming. Our unbecoming is our unbeing.

Daily life has become a series of endless interface interactions preprogrammed by the invisible hand of cybernetic flows of images and signs sustaining, encompassing and overflowing a hyperreality. One of the dire consequences of this hyperreality is death of a sense of historicity of the very signs and images we are drowning in as they come pre-formed, pre-figured, pre-packaged to us. Just like the clothes on our back we do not get to see the hand which make these signs and we behave like those hands were never there. They do not seem to bear marks of their history. They purport to be ahistoric and use ahistoric categories to sort themselves.

We are given an ontology without an ontogenesis, a morphology without morphogenesis and a chronotropy without chronogenesis. This article proposes that such a suspension of becoming into just being leaves reflection into our becoming as we unfold and unfurl or rather coil and constrict under capitalism entirely unnecessary to live in this image-world. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, we need to first answer…

What is reflection to begin with?

This is not exactly a great formulation of the question. A better formulation will be what does it mean to have or not have reflection? Here we seek guidance from philosopher Gilbert Simondon. In his magnum opus Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information he draws out a vivid picture of reflection by making an ideal distinction between a pure vitality which is absolutely non reflexive and pure psychicality which is purely reflexive, neither amount to anything real but give us a plane to walk through to explore the nature of reflection. Here is one of those passages:

[B]y hypothesis alone, we are saying that pure biological reality would be constituted by the non- reciprocity of the relation between the domain of the simultaneous and that of the successive, whereas psychological reality is precisely the establishment of this reciprocity that can be called reflection. The pure living being indeed integrates its past experience into its present behavior, but it cannot carry out the inverse integration, because it cannot introduce reflection due to which the present behavior, already imagined in its results and analyzed in its structure, is placed on the same ontological level as the past behavior. For the pure living being, there is a heterogeneity between experience and behavior; for the psychological individual, there is a relative and progressive homogeneity of these two realities; instead of sinking into the past by becoming pure experience, the past behavior conserves the characteristics of interiority that make it a behavior; it conserves a certain coefficient of presence; inversely, the present behavior, consciously represented as that which will have consequences as effective as those that now constitute the real experience of the past, is already an experience in advance. The possibility of foresight and the possibility of remembering converge because they share the same nature and have a single function: to establish the reciprocity of the order of the simultaneous and the order of the successive.

So according to this passage we have two modes or levels of being, biological and psychological (this is not a Cartesian dualism as explained elsewhere in the text) and on the biological level the concept of reflection is not applicable. In more succinct words, reflection is an internal resonance of psychic beings towards behavioral divergence which is grounded on being temporally embedded or rather “chronogenetic“.

From above analysis we can see that reflection is a fundamentally temporal and diachronic process and removing it does not mean that something is inanimate just that it relies on more spatially embedded synchronic interfaces (which constitute the biological stratum). So what has happened to it then?

A friend of mine raised a concern that as we are going ahead, the history of the world as it is will be lost or rather erased, destroyed by the fascist forces. And while that is a legitimate concern, I pointed out to them that there lies a much bigger concern that maybe the fascist forces do not even need to wipe out our history because in a way our history has become irrelevant to us.

And the way that happened has been through synchronic reduction of diachronic processes which is these images and signs. Like set of icons and buttons and software elements on our screens, in order to use whom we are not required to know any diachronic dimension of them, they subsist in atemporal structure which only changes when a major software update comes about.

The ahistorical software elements are the interface medium through which we interact and use the inner machinery of our computers and wider digital world of internet. But this mode of interaction is not limited to just that anymore unfortunately, this has become the model for how our entire rest of the bureaucratized life outside the computers is also increasingly getting overcoded.

But overcoding what exactly? Pretty much everything you can imagine. Do you want to go on a trip? Select one of the many preplanned tourist packages which will take you exactly where a tourist is expected to go. Wanna plan the trip yourself? Wanna get laid? Install Tinder and swipe till you find your fuck buddy.

Let us get more serious, what if you want to vote but don’t know whom to vote for? Simple as ever, just search for their manifestos online and check popularity polls and twitter trends. Want to buy a new house, choose the variables on this website and it will spit best options in your budget.

But you could say, isn’t all this just convenience? Well of course yes, this is all so convenient. For us… and for them. And I don’t mean convenient for them just in sense of handing them over all the information they could need on us but letting them mark out what is available in the realm of possible decisions as per their convenience and what ever is just not that. I am not just saying the world is becoming a digital panopticon but further we are becoming digital automaton.

We click on the buttons designed for us and are supposed to leave the rest to the almighty algorithm. Human agency is an afterthought employed in choosing the brand of soft drinks curated by the supermarket. The causal chain is made irreflexive and simplified. This is the modal of pedagogy for the world children learn and start assembling the layers of interfaces made up of their family and peers. Lacan proclaimed the unconscious is structured like a language, but we now find that socius seems to have been structured like a programme with layers of interfacing modalities and registers we call our spheres of influence.

It is not just that the world becomes more and more alienated for interindividual existentialities but more than that individuating existentiality becomes alienated. The more covert this lack of awareness becomes, it is not just that people rarely have time to reflect on causal chains, but people no longer have a temporality to reflect on their own becoming or rather unbecoming, besides the atemporal narrative models predigested for them. They just have the nuclear family narrative model, community college narrative model, the Instagram model narrative model (pun not intended), the homeless narrative model, the prisoner narrative model, the billionaire narrative mode, the American dream narrative meta-model.

This has gotten so bad that most people don’t even believe anything they watch on T.V. even anymore, not in the way you think though, not because they distrust T.V. but because belief requires too much of a subjectivity to precipitate. Beliefs predicate subjects. Rather than building any system of beliefs, they just repeat what they hear latest on TV like echolalia and not only does that the same TV programme (pun intended) can say exactly opposite things 2 days later, it would make no difference because they are just repeatable of words to be repeated.

We have a desubjectification problem at our hands. What cool kids call NPC epidemic. The significative chain does not even lead to any inductive constructs anymore. It is merely an orgy of flying signifiers with no ties to any subsistence, these are the penultimate consequences of Baudrillard’s hyper-reality. Penultimate because it can always get worse afterall.

They stopped being nodes in machinic phyla of systems to become just irreverent lines of consistent vector of velocity. There isn't any activity in them, they are just dots crossed by the fluxes in the system, unbearing and irrelevant. This is a fervent zombie apocalypse.

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

―Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

We have forgotten the art of warfare. Language is a battlefield before it is means of communication. We have semioticized language to detriment of our political horizons. We assume that whenever someone says autistic, or evil or god, they are using a signifier to refer to some pre existing signified rather than the plainly obvious reality that they are throwing their hand at the ongoing battle on so as to what do we do when we say autism, or evil, or god. It is a matter of doing when we speak rather than meaning anything. But we are so obsessed with what we mean we forgot to do anything of value.

We pay tribute to radical behaviourism, cognitivism, structuralism, psychoanalysis but never pragmatism. We have become profoundly unpragmatic and it shows in impotence of leftist politics. We have to keep the history of history and the sense of historicity in our present alive because, the direction we are going, we no longer know what to do with history. Is it just for storing in file cabinets? Are they just raw data archives to us now?

A sense of historicism is already lost as we no longer think in terms of diachrony. Diachrony is dead, everything is just synchronic category, genealogy is dead.

I know who I am, where I come from, what I want, what I don’t want, where I am going because I am temporally embedded, and my life is an accumulative libidinal investment and that is what is at stake for me when I step outside my house and a sense of that is increasingly lost. It is no shock then the rise of unreflective mob violence which libidinal release of pure destratified unformed passion at the disposal of the fascist forces to direct.

"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free."

— Vladimir Nabokov

But the circle is the new spiral now. No authentic sociality can occur when individuals are merely interfaces. Also, the interfacing of the world is instilled since first education itself: the overbearing amount of ritual and the subtle, pervasive amount of banal, veiled negative feedback promotes the 21st Century Acephallic Man. Along with diachronicity, history, genealogy, sociality, and the spiral, turns out homo ludens (being of soil which plays) is also dead. For one cannot play if there is no one to play. If nothing is said, nothing can be refuted. We have gone mute for there is nothing to speak about.