By the Late John Brockman

by John Brockman

  “The theory of description matters most. / It is the theory of the word for those / For whom the word is the making of the world.”122 Description is the thing: nothing.

  Confusion: no-thing=thing. The incredible something of nothing.

  Things operate the waste system. Idealization or performance: “Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.”123 Activity is undifferentiable: no difference: no between. The performance decreates the idealization, the thing. And yet . . . the description of performance is itself an idealization, a thing. Confusion: “we had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / in a different form, beyond any meaning.”124

  The empirical: knowledge derived from experience. The epistemological: investigation of the methods and limits of knowledge. At the intersection of the empirical and the epistemological: a convenient nowhere, anytime, to be or not to be. Confusion: the incredible something of nothing. Beyond the reality principle there is nothingness: the void. And beyond the void: description of the void: the idealization, the objectification of nothing. Description of nothing, of event, of process, of doing, of void: a thing. The description is the thing. At the intersection of the empirical and the epistemological: a convenient nowhere, anytime, to be or not to be.

  There is “only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from experience. / The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every moment / And every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been.”125 At the intersection of the empirical and the epistemological: the first time that says anytime; the first place that says nowhere; the first thing that says nothing: the fact with a sense of humor.

  Truth is now a matter of convenience; concepts are valid only in their capacity to sustain interest: only in their use. The interchangeability of concepts is a consequence of the non-interchange- ability of the coupling operation. The description of the coupling of the undifferentiated activity: a thing, a distinction, a differentiation. “An instrument which would depict the Source / Does not produce what baffles it as well.”126 The description is the thing: everything. It is not a case of different ways of putting the same thing. “Life consists / Of propositions about life.”127 It’s the next word that matters. “That one word might be a name, the release from a name.”128

  The round earth followed from the flat earth. Before the of the round earth, all thoughts, concepts, were the product of the sensibility of life on a flat earth. The earth was flat until the point of creation of the round earth; which is not to say that the earth was flat until we realized that all along it had been round.

  The information on the previous page is false. The previous page is the flat earth. This page is the round earth. The earth is round: this page is being read. If we talk of a flat earth producing a round earth; the round earth is doing the talking. If we talk of the previous page: this page is doing the talking. The previous page as an entity is the invention of this page, it can exist only on this page, it can live only on this page. We must not assume the existence of any entity until we are compelled to do so. Without this page the previous page could not have existence as an entity. The previous page exists as an entity only through decreation; this page decreates the previous page. Decreation of the thing described: assumption by this page of the description of the thing described: this page describing the previous page. Decreation; this page invents the previous page: round earth invents flat earth.

  “There is nothing more to invent, nothing more to play with.”129 No creation, no becoming, no pretention, no intention: “that’s not how the show is run: / This independent mind, / Unkingdom’d, might as well be none.”130 No one: “Not the intense moment / Isolated, with no before and after, / But a lifetime burning in every moment / And not the lifetime of one man only / But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.”131

  And whatever you can do . . . there will be no difference. And whatever you will do . . . there will be no difference. And whatever you could do, don’t do, should do . . . and whatever you do . . . there will be no difference.

  Unitless unity: silence. “But listen! When, / If ever in the windings of the dance, / To-be-said and saying in perfection fit, / Another silence listens: listen again.”132

  Stopping: never having started.

  III

  Disposable world.

  The world is a waste system. A disposal of categories and names.

  The world is no longer important. The world is no longer a thing: description is. It’s a world of words. Words are finite: they signify nothing other than themselves. “The word must be the thing it represents. Otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity:”1 there isn’t any. There’s no thinking subject: only words. Only descriptions.

  No thinking subject. Metaphysical I, instead: not a part, but a limit. A unitless unity. The physical, the phenomenal world is gone. We are no longer a part of it. We never were a part of it. The world is finite: the objective world was no more real than the words that were its habit.2 A finite world of words: the world as limits of language. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”3 No part, but limit. “No longer any refuge in the infinities of grandeur,”4 of the universe, of physicalized reality. No part, but limit. Never forget this finiteness, this limit of man.

  Finite man: metaphysical I: unitless unity: no part, but limit. It means that there is no longer any possible distinction between observer and observed. It means that we live in a new whole, a new reality, one that is slippery, one that is expressed in language but cannot be expressed by language. It means that “observing is completing and we are content in a world that shrinks to an immediate whole that we do not need to understand, complete without secret arrangements of it in the mind.”5

  “The same old fallacy persists—the desire to introduce a unity in the world: the mythologists made it a woman or an elephant; the scientists made fun of the mythologists, but themselves turned the world into the likeness of a mechanical toy. One analogy is as good as another.”6

  The “words of the world are the life of the world.”7 It is the speech of truth in its true solitude: a nature that is created in what it says.8

  The world is no longer important: true. The world is the only important thing to think about: true. The world: a closed door. “A closed door slammed in the face of man. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.”9

  But through what? The physical world: an artifact, made or constructed of some basic, primary substance. The physical world is a created world: the production of something from nothing. The finite world, world of words: a new world, nonworld: everything must come from everything. Description is the thing: the world is created in what it says. Created: thus destroyed. The physical world is meaningless: “transfer physical to language.”10

  Finite man: “he disposes the world in categories.”11 A waste system: there’s no getting rid of them without naming them, that’s the thing to keep in mind.12 Thus, any name, any definition or category empties the world as it creates it. It is a name that gives birth, gives life, while at the same time bringing separation and death. The world is a waste system of the unreal: nothing is left but the unreal. Just to name things.

  The death of the world: “the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too . . . all I know is what the words know.”13

  Tired of the old words, the comfort words, bored with the old descriptions. All categories are pseudo-categories. All categories, all concepts are waste. Magic, myth, religion, art . . . ideology, science, literature: comfort words. There is no longer any possibility of objective points of support outside speech or thought. “Meaning and necessity are preserved only in the linguistic practices which embody them.”14

  Thus, no meaning can be ascribed to “existing world.” It is “neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite simply. That is the most remarkable thing about it. And suddenly the obviousness of this str
ikes us with irresistible force. All at once the whole splendid construction collapses.”15 And the world born of the word goes back to the word.

  “Universe is not a very large expanding balloon with galactic light bulbs interspersed at varying distances.” E= MC2 showed that “Universe is not a simultaneous assembly of things. Universe isn’t even there—in fact man’s invention of the concept reveals his terror crouching behind a facade of omniscience.”16 Universe: the most comprehensive world generalization. Universe isn’t there: it simply is. It’s not a thing, or things: it is. It’s not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.17

  We are deprived of our comfort words, our comfortable world. We are denied, everything is denied. Things no longer have any meaning. Things no longer exist. There is no longer the possibility of a universe of psychological, social, or functional signification. There is no longer the possibility of constructing a new objective world, even though it be more solid, more immediate. There is no longer the possibility of a single world, a whole world, a unified world.

  The unity is unitless: man is dead. This is a terrifying concept for man to contemplate. Absolutely terrifying. We have tried to force reality into a framework of space and time just as the ancients tried to place reality within a framework of emotions. It doesn’t work. Witness the image of the earth as seen from the moon: night and day at the same time: all times all the time: no matter what the time. Times have changed.

  “Everyone talks about the Earth being round but does anyone actually believe it? Nature of roundness is that you eventually get back to the same place—nowhere to go—no infinity. Not condensation, but condensation of mind. We are all living through one of our most terrifying dream horror fantasies: we’re locked in a room, and the walls and ceilings are closing in on us. All the things we’ve been raised to worship—man’s limitless power, the ever-giving nature of mother earth—all these infinite possibilities are beginning to seem less infinite. In fact, the infinite horizon is heading this way fast.”18

  We can’t even continue to talk of Earth: the place: a physical clump of dirt spinning around outer space: outside what. The world still goes spinning around, but it’s in my head. It’s happening in my head. I do it all in my head. It’s a finite world of words: “where is this world . . . and what do I know of it? Where do I seize it? Where do I believe it? Where do I surrender myself to it entirely? Here! Or nowhere.”19

  Words do not signify anything but their own reality. Words do not create the universe out of nothing but out of all. All possibilities exist in any: “the whole story from Genesis to Apocalypse in any event; in any metamorphoses. Therefore it is important to keep changing the subject. The subject changes before our very eyes.”20

  What is: is something else. Finite man: he has no interest in what exists. He has no time for what is. No beginning, no ending. He lives without life: the story of life. It’s over: never began. It’s not a physical death, a physical end. It’s simply that “to tell a story has become strictly impossible.”21 It’s a world of words: saying is inventing . . . you invent nothing.22 Saying makes it so.23

  Beyond the world: a world of words with no beyond. No psychic walls of I’s. No incommunicable mass of we’s. A finite world of words: a sense of limit, a limit which does not energize subject matter, but penetrates it, dissolves it, creating both dream and reality, life and death. A finite world of words: you can’t tell where the subject is, you can’t tell what the subject is.

  Reject the world. Metaphysical I instead: no part, but limit. Reject the world. Reject man. Be faithful to the conception of a limit. The new finite view of man: the rejection of humanism (doctrine that man is the measure): a complete anthropomorphization of the world, whether pantheism, idealism, or rationalism. Reject man. Reject the world. Reject the thinking subject for limit, the limit of language, a world created in what it says. “I’m in words, made of words, other’s words . . . I’m all these words, all these strangers.”24

  Man is no longer necessary. Neither are you. Man is dead: he is totally deprived. Of himself, even of nothing. There is nowhere to go in the absurdity of his lifetime. Any new style, any new life, any new world, is but a god where gods are no longer valid. “The god that one so finds is but a word born of words, and returns to the word. For the reply we make to ourselves is assuredly never anything other than the question itself.”25

  Reject world as unit. There is no phenomenal world as an external point of reference, of support. There is no possible communication between these illusory points. Communication is impossible: “the thing said and the thing heard have a common source.”26 And it’s not an inventing mind, a thinking subject. Metaphysical I instead: no part, but limit. Me: I do it all in my head: what head?

  “A world full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”27 It points to nothing other than the fact that it is. It’s not a metaphor. It’s nothing you can believe in. It is. The moment you let it out of your head, it’s dead: it’s real.

  Reject life “in any number of ‘worlds’ or ‘universes’ or in trifling delusions such as ‘past,’ ‘present,’ or ‘future.’”28 It’s all denied. Finite man in a finite world. Or, finite man as finite world.

  The world is unintelligible. “It is impossible to include it all under one large counter such as ‘God’ or ‘Truth’ and other verbalisms, or the disease of the symbolic language.”29 All such words are comfort words. The world is unintelligible. There is no one way, no one. The world is unintelligible: the world is our intelligence. “Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the absurdity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, within its vital boundary, in the mind.”30

  Any definition empties the world as it creates it. Empties it of all life. Any definition of the world fixes it. If it is fixed, it is dead. Only by a name do we know what is dead. Only through a category do we comprehend the unreal. Names and categories, names and definitions: comfort words. And “nothing has been changed except what is unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all.”31 Disposable world: comfort words: there’s no getting rid of them without naming them and their contraptions, that’s the thing to keep in mind.

  In a world with no signification, in a world where psychic, social, and functional resolution is impossible, in a world where life lies hidden in language . . . the fate of the author is to have nothing, absolutely nothing to say. The book is a lie, the words have no author. To live in this world beyond the world, a world of words with no beyond, the author does not write about the world. Any attempt to do so is merely another fiction in a world of fictions. The aim of the book must be to attract subtlety, to attract complexity. But then, this is not a book, it has nothing to do with books, with literature. It can’t be read: it’s performance. Performance without a player. The author has no intention of its meaning.

  “All the notions by which we have lived are tottering. The sciences are calling the tune.”32 Knowledge is now transitional. The real is no longer neatly delimited. Place, time, and matter admit of liberties that, not long ago, no one had an inkling of. Common sense is now appealed to only by the ignorant. The value of ordinary evidence is down to zero. What was once believed by all, always and everywhere, seems no longer to carry much weight.33 Knowledge is now transitional: it’s something to forget.

  When knowledge enters the room, forget it. None of the categories work, all explanations are wrong. Description vs. explanation: explanation is always wrong. It’s a world of words, of descriptions, and “description comes to an end, and we realize that it has left nothing behind it: it has instituted a double movement of creation and destruction.”34

  Knowledge: the expression “to know everything” has as its complement the word universe. But to know everything includes knowing that the universe isn’t even there. The universe is the big con. Our widest possible knowledge-world generalization has dissolved into metaphysical ha-ha.

  Universe is the big con. Physical theory is
no longer “reality.” We got lost “once speculation was concerned no longer with subphenomena assumed to be similar to the phenomena directly observed, but rather with “things” that in no way resemble the things we know, since they only send us signals which we interpret as best we can. Plus our language, and our logic, our concepts have been found wanting: all this intellectual material will not fit into the nucleus of an atom, where everything is without precedent, without shape. Debatable probabilities have taken the place of definite and distinct facts and the fundamental distinction between observation and its object is no longer conceivable.”35