The world is a madhouse.
It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the universe.
– NASA, “Dark Energy, Dark Matter”
Why haven’t we professed failure yet? Why haven’t we reckoned with the vacuum at the center of our skull? It is the treasure of Knowing that begets the realization that one knows nothing. And this is not a Socratic treasure since the Socratic gesture still dances in the delights of Rationality. We are living in Irrational times and that’s where our knowing begins. Indeed, this is a Knowing against Enlightenment, a Knowing that knows towards Darkness. What is it to know Darkness? How do we sit with the certainty of uncertainty as it has been uttered as a cosmic fact which is therefore a physical fact which is therefore a fact which structures the topological schema and positioning of the Earth which therefore structures the biological organisms which come to exist on the Earth and which therefore generates these beings we’ve learned to call the Human? Might we need to disperse with the “therefore”? Meaning: If to Know must start and began at the heart of Darkness, engulfed in its sea of unseeable energy and matter, encased in and by its conditioning of the possibility of knowing at all then might this be enough to ridicule the sincerity through which we think the World coherent. The most coherent thing we can say right now is that the World is not coherent. The most clear words of the 21st Century is that the 21st Century is unclear. Listen to what Denise Da Silva has to say about this:
What if, instead of the Ordered World, we could image The World as a Plenum, an infinite composition in which each existent’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existents, with which it is entangled beyond space and time.
– Denise Ferriera Da Silva, “Difference Without Separability”
Entanglement. I’ll take it! It seems clearly to be the case. In fact, it does not make much sense how we could have carried along all this time following one white man after another down the long and lonely road toward thinking the World as completely Ordered and absolutely Determinable by the Humans. We are, after all, only capable of having any experience at all because the Sun and Earth are positioned at anthropologically generative locations in relative distance to each other – a fact which some of the scientist say has only recently come to benefit the Humans (200,000 years or some weird shit like that?). How could the Humans have gone so long thinking otherwise. Well, let’s phone a friend:
Ever since the post-Enlightenment consolidation of the Kantian program, physics has provided models for scientific studies of human conditions – a task facilitated by Hegel’s account of time as the productive force and theater of knowledge and morality. Unfortunately, however, these models have been successful precisely because of how these writings on the human as a social thing rely on the same departures from Medieval philosophy that supported modern philosophers’ claim of knowledge with certainty, namely, efficient causes and mathematical demonstration, which ground the modern text.
– Denise Ferriera Da Silva, “Difference Without Separability”
I guess the question is always: Who is “We”? And what would “We” lose if “We” thought more deeply about the raw materiality of infinite entanglement? Perhaps, one would lose their claim to the World and to the imposition of one’s own certainty as the Certainty upon which the world might be ordered? The “refugee crisis” is a much less cosmic example of the way this concert with certainty has played out for the Humans.
The racial grammar activated in reactions to the flow of refugees to Europe is but an iteration of the modern text. Not only does it carry over into the claim of certainty, its claims of truth rest on the same pillars – namely, separability, determinacy, and sequentiality – modern philosophers have assembled to support their knowledge program.
– Denise Ferriera Da Silva, “Difference Without Separability”
The flow of refugees into Europe presents Europe with an opportunity to know Darkness, to know what it is to not Know, to exist within the inseparable, indeterminibility and nonsequential entanglement of difference without separability. The non-localization of the World. God rolls dice bitch. Give it up. The World is a madhouse and this shit ain’t Socratic. It’s fractal and its representations are autopoietic; it’s a parade of infinite recursion and repetition enmeshed, embedded, and mostly, in the dark. But before we go. I can hear the crowd already: Isn’t the Science at the heart of this idea given to us by the Human? Isn’t this a perversion of the purity of position through which one might critique Rationality? Isn’t quantum physics itself a form of Rationality? How could one critique Rationality with a notion of entanglement which itself stems from the scientific apparatus of the modern world?
My response to this is much like the response Andy Warhol gives when asked whether or not his art could be described as “original sculpture.”
Mumble Theory 