By the Late John Brockman

by John Brockman

  What in the world has happened? “Simply that our means of investigation and action have far outstripped our means of representation and understanding. This is the enormous new fact that results from all the other new facts. This one is positively transcendent.”36

  “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.”37 This new fact is positively transcendent. But in the new world, nonworld of this new fact, there can be no transcendence. The world is finite: it can’t fit into the terminology, into the constraints of humanistic consciousness. It will only be viewed there as an absence, as a negation of the terms and categories that inform Western man. It’s not explainable. It won’t be defined. It’s bereft of all the dogma of rationalism, of humanism. Forget it.

  No man is my friend. I have no interest in the human condition. No interest in you, your ideas, your words. No interest in your opinions.

  Don’t believe it. Don’t believe anything I say. There’s nothing to say. I have nothing to say. There’s nothing to think about.

  Disposable world: enigmatic world. Epistemological enigma: “the facts of inquiry dissolve into the reality of the enquirer, casting further doubt on both.”38 The world is a waste system of extinct epistemologies.

  One is the great signifier: creator of all the comfort words: God, Truth, Humanity, Writer, etc. One is obsolete. We can no longer deal with single level definitions. It doesn’t follow that there are multiple level definitions either. There is no signification. One doesn’t signify. One obscures. There is no identity beyond the words that are its representation. There is no identity: words are what count. One musn’t let one get in the way.

  There can be no psychic, social, or functional resolution of all this. We must get back to the source. But there is no source. The source, the one reality is not to be found. There is no source. There is no answer.

  I beseech you enter your life. “I beseech you learn to say ‘I,’ when I question you: For you are no part, but a whole. No portion, but a being.”39

  A leap over the psychic walls of man. Drop the body: the physicalized conception of perception. Meditate the putrifying corpse. The discovery of the private individual form: thank God for the names of the body.

  Crashing through the personal psychic walls. I am out of my mind. “The lives lived in the mind are at an end. They never were. Were and are not. It is not to be believed.”40 I am out of my mind. Out of the personal psyche. He was not a man yet he was nothing else. If in the mind, he vanished, taking there the mind’s own limits, like a tragic thing. Without existence, existing everywhere.41

  Self-conscious option isn’t enough: self-conscious option is too much. There’s no thinking subject. Thus, it’s not a question of thinking. It’s not a question of thinking but of that which is its intelligence. It’s of intelligence that I must think.

  Description “once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality; it now asserts its creative function. It once made us see things, now it seems to destroy them, as if its intention to discuss them aimed only at blurring their contours, at making them incomprehensible, at causing them to disappear altogether.”42 Man is dead: but the humanist, the modern man instructed by the terms of liberal thought and conventions, will be completely unable to understand this uncompromising attitude of finiteness.

  The world is made up, not made. The world is created, and created things can no longer be considered as intermediaries leading to an infinity of other things. They are dead: they are their own fictions, begin and end in themselves, live and die in themselves. Created things are dead. The life you live is a lie. The world you inhabit is a lie. There is no need for fiction in the world: the world is the only fiction.

  Personality is not the only way. The individual is one of the problems of our time. So, too, the mass of men. What to do about amount, what to do about quantity. They’re nothing, starting from one. In a finite world, numbers don’t count: words do. There’s no addition, no accretion, no infinite attainments. Nothing and everything, no one and everyone: man is dead. “The mass is nothing. The number of men in a mass of men is nothing. The mass is no greater than the singular man of the mass.”43

  Finite man, finite intelligence: control. Not in control, but as control, as reality, as intelligence. Finite intelligence: the mass is no greater than the singular man of the mass. Expect no life from the mass. Expect no voice from the people.

  Life is inexpressible. Life is inexcusable.

  It’s getting much harder to live. It’s getting much easier to accept the idea that “it is an illusion that we were ever alive.”44 Life is a knowledge, not an existence. Life is disposing of the waste: names and categories. Name it: it’s dead. Then you live in those names and by those names. You live in those names and by those names when you live in the world.

  It’s no longer possible to tell a story: life is a story. It’s a story, a narrative series of pictures. A series of timeless tableaus, an infinitely successive series of nows. But this can’t be. It isn’t. “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”45 The world is finite: that means “it” isn’t. We are free from the pictures and the lives lived in the mind are at an end. Words are what matter.

  I’m going out of my mind. I’m trying to hold on to my body, my life. It’s a horrifying experience.

  “We had thought to control it by assigning it a meaning, but the world has only, little by little, lost all its life.”46 Man is dead. It’s not enough to perish. One has to become unintelligible, almost ridiculous.

  “No sign of life but life, itself, the presence of the intelligible in that which is created as its symbol.”47 Life is a knowledge, not an existence. Life is not lived, it is known. Known: not experienced. Imagine, you had an experience.

  Disposable world. A reality of “decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated.”48 “Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers.”49

  To make something created pass into the uncreated: no action, but realization. All created things are dead things. They belong to the world. “We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves,”50 by peopling the world with the dead images of mankind.

  The created world is a world of waste, of life. And life is the elimination of what is dead. We give names to things that can’t be named: we create life, we create death. Creation: the waste system. “Life is the elimination of what is dead.”51

  All these things. All these people. All these places. All this waste, this garbage: it’s me. There was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me, talking to me of me.52 “When I dream and invent without a backward glance, am I not . . . Nature?”53

  Dispense with the notion of nature: a creative power that makes something from nothing. Nature is scenery built up by man. Man is dead. The unity is unitless. There is no continuity, no accretion, no incremental serial advances, no depth. There is no nature. There was never anyone but me talking to me of me. No nature: just a nature created in what it says.

  Dismiss yourself. Man is dead. There’s no nature but “a fall, into the state of nature. The spirit, the human essence, hides, buried in the natural object: ‘projected’ . . . the death of gods and the birth of poetry.”54 A nature created in what it says.

  “Each herb and each tree, mountain, hill, earth and sea, cloud, meteor and star, are men seen afar.”55 There are no external points of support in reality. The unity is unitless: this is not just a rival to an objective reality. There is no real world: it is an illusion. The unity is unitless. This is the whole truth, and it can only be apprehended through its contrast with the illusion, the real world. Thus, “man perceives in the world only what already lies within him; but to perceive what lies within him, man needs the world.”56

  Take the real out of the world and put it back where it belongs, where it always has been: realization. Any system
that attempts to base a pattern of thought, or a linguistic practice, on some independent foundation in reality, is impossible. Any system is impossible. If these systems “need any justification, it must lie within them, because there are no independent points of support outside them. That kind of objectivism is an illusion, produced, no doubt, by the reassuring character of explanation, which is that any support that is needed comes from the center, man himself.”57

  But the center has dissolved. Man is dead: the great explainer, the great explanation. He has lost the center: he was the center, the whole in which he was contained. There can be no more explanations, no more worlds.

  There is no center, no source. You can’t explain what isn’t there. Metaphysical I, nonphysical I: it’s “the fault of pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that.”58

  No center, no source, no whole, no one: and now no me. What in the world do you do? “It’s a lot to expect of one creature that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.”59

  The physical world is no longer real. That rational, reasoned, objective world of classical science and humanistic thought is now positively mystical and occult. “Combat all rationalist dogmas that stand in the way of a metaphysical universe.”60 Man is dead. Metaphysical I instead. Not reality, but realization. Dismiss yourself. Let go: there’s nothing lost.

  This is the age of unimportance. Reject world. Reject external reality: reject internal reality. Say no to yourself, to your great truths, to your great men, to your great books.

  Not revelations of belief, not the Capital Letters: Truth, God, Freedom, Justice, Will . . . but the precious portents of our own powers: the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Finite man: he “made a personal matter of what had before his time been treated in dogmatic form, dominated by tradition. He had no use for anything except evidence or observation scrupulously verified. What this amounted to was a refusal to attach to language any value derived merely from people or books . . . his self tipped the balance.”61

  No more great men, no more great books: his self tipped the balance. His realization was the balance: is the balance. But in a finite world, even the self is denied, reduced to an object. No more great men, no more great books . . . no more importance. Deny your “own validity . . . Surrender to the flux, to the drift towards a new and unthinkable order.”62 “Uproot yourself. Uproot yourself, socially and vegetatively. Exile yourself from every earthly country.”63

  No: negation is the only way, there is no way. The universe must be created out of all, not created from nothing. Created by negation for creating or not creating changes nothing. Changes nothing because all created things are unreal: are nothing. Negation is the only way: no.

  Finite man: he says no to everything in order to get at himself. Yet he’s not alive, he’s not himself. He lives in his image: the unreal.

  What is: is other things. Man is dead. He lives in his image: the unreal. “How can anyone be what one is? No sooner does the question occur to us than it takes us out of ourselves, and at once we see how impossible we are. Immediately we are astonished at being someone, at the absurdity of every individual fact of existence, at the curious effect of seeing our acts beliefs and persons duplicated; everything human is too human—an oddity, a delusion, a reflex, a nonsense. The system of conventions becomes comic, sinister, unbearable to think of, almost unbelievable! Laws, religion, customs, clothes, beliefs . . . all seem curiosities, a masquerade.”64

  Metaphysical I: of whom I know nothing. I don’t know who I am. There is no signifiable reality. No one truth, no essence. It’s slippery: there’s nothing left to hold on to. We are completely deprived. You are totally denied. And I: I don’t know who I am. “It has not yet been our good fortune to establish with any degree of accuracy what I am, where I am, whether I am words among words, or silence in the midst of silence.”65

  I: words among words or silence in the midst of silence. The final answer will be in the transcendence of all categories, of all names: the death of the word. But this can’t be so: there is no transcendence: no answer. World is finite: there is no distinction between observation and its object. Not reality, but realization. Transcendence belongs to the real, infinite world: reality. But there can be no transcendence of realization: no distinction between observation and its object. No differentiation: there was never anyone but me talking to me of me. And me: I go where the words go: nowhere. There is no final perfection, no answer. No one.

  “Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions.”66 What is important is not “to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such to themselves.”67

  A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in fantastic amounts of data, or in huge libraries filled with books. There’s no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative. Ask the most subtle sensibilities in the world what questions they are asking themselves.

  The words have no author. “There are words better without an author, without a poet, or having a separate author, a different poet, an accretion from ourselves, intelligent, beyond intelligence, an artificial man.”68 The words have no author. The book is a lie. It’s a performance: by a reader. Reader is a comfort word and the author has no intention of its meaning. Author is a comfort word and the author has no intention of its meaning.

  An accretion from ourselves, intelligent, by an intelligence, an artificial man. Unreal realization: “freedom is like a man who kills himself each night, an incessant butcher.”69 Artificial man’s not himself: unreal realization. He is revealed, secularized as a thing, an object. “He has lost the whole in which he was contained.”70 He has shed his human clothes.

  Just as the ancients peopled the universe, we have set out to empty it of all life. It’s a finite world of words: there is no life in man, there is no existence in things, there is no evolution in nature. Man is dead: “drowned in the depth of things (of himself), man ultimately no longer even perceives them: his role is soon limited to experiencing, in their name, totally humanized impressions and desires.”71 But there is no depth in things. Words are what count: the word must be the thing it represents. Words are finite: there can be no depth, no interiority.

  There’s no perfection in humanity. Man was considered the perfect center in a world of infinite things, infinite depth. But man has been rooted out of his human home, disallowed his humanistic habit. Man is dead: he is “thinged,” he is artificial: he mocks his own meaning, he’s not to be believed.

  But humanism attempts “to recover everything, including whatever attempts to retrace its limits, even to impugn it as a whole.”72 No matter what: there is man and his nature. And “a common nature must be the eternal answer to the single question of our civilization—only one possible answer to everything: man.”73

  This humanistic attitude is considered the inevitable attitude of the emancipated and instructed man. But answers are no answer: there’s no perfection in humanity. “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal, whose nature is absolutely constant.”74 A veritable object. “Man is a sick animal:” to think he can be cured is to “imprison him in the disease.”75

  What was an animal? It is the human that is alien, the human that has a cousin on the moon, “the human that demands speech from beasts and the incommunicable mass.”76

  The mass. The human mass. The impossible agglomerate mass. The incommunicable human mass. The people. “From their places masses move, stark as laws. Masses of what? One does not ask. There somewhere man is too, vast conglomerate of all of nature’s kingdoms, as lonely and as bound.”77 The impossible people.
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  The mass is nothing: the people aren’t. It’s the human that is alien. Man is dead: the men have no shadows. “A man is a result, a demonstration.”78 An unreal realization.

  I am out of my mind. Beyond the I to something else. A place of nothing else and no beyond. I am out of my mind. Deprived even of my I. The I which becomes merely a more immediate object in the wasteland of objects. And “the role of objects is to restore silence, for objects are no more real than the words that are their habit.”79 I am out of my mind: am I words in the midst of words or silence in the midst of silence.