Active Nihilism

When Satyr started his topic on Nihilism <> Realism; I thought I was already aware of all the things he was saying... the metaphysical and philosophical Nihilism that N. had already addressed.
But when I tried to dwelve more into the topic, I have come to realize this is an issue that's not at all been explored as visible and obvious as it appears to us, or as it did to me. I've been complacent to absorb his writings as a "matter of fact" instead of exploring this as a real contemporary phenomenon. The more I tried to search for books or authors dealing on these metaphysical inversions and abstraction of words with no correspondence to any real referrants today, just circulating empty simulacra,... I couldn't find any authors, books, links dealing in this massive subject.

If we can all agree that this is the most critical Inversion at the root of feminization, I request all members here to contribute to whatever they can find towards this topic. More heads, the better.

Thanks.

First Contribution:

---Nihilism, the word referring to a concept, is detached from its most popular usage as a philosophical idea dealing with the absence of morals or a teleos, or a universal meaning.
I submit the idea that the term must be rescued form the very nihilism it has been hijacked by to imply the opposite of what it intends.
In this case nihilism refers to a human construct, an ideal, an abstraction, which finding no corresponding reference outside human minds, calls this a nil.

I redefine nihilism as that which rejects what is perceived, what is experienced, what is past(nature), and not what rejects human constructs trying to fill a void, based no need.

If the absolute is absent then reaffirming this is not nihilism, but a reaffirmation of existence, offering potentials for creativity, for becoming.
If there is no universal moral standard, outside of evolved social behavioural necessities, and no universal meaning, outside the delusions of religious fanatics, and infected, by nihilism, secular humanists seeking comforting, then this positive reaffirmation of the absent is, in fact, not a nullification but a position opening up possibilities: space/time.


The word "nihilism" simply means to annul, or it is a doctrine of annulling, negating.

In modern times it is only used to indicate a negation of human constructs, which have no reference to anything outside the human condition.
In other words those who negate existence, as being just that, void of meaning, a finality, a moral standard, a universal, absolute, have twisted the word to mean a positive, simply because it is positive to human needs.
The insinuation here is that reality must be positively inclined towards human life, and not that human life stands in a state of antagonism, resistance, to a reality which also gives rise to life.

This reversal of meanings is typical of nihilism and its methodologies.
Not only was the "word" first, in this self-serving paradigm, but humans are the centre of existence, which must conform to human needs, hopes, and projections.  
The organism, in this case the human species, is not burdened with adapting to the world, but the world must adapt to human constructs, defined and symbolized with words.

Language has one function: to symbolize a mental abstraction.
A mental abstraction, an idea, being the product of sensual data, collected and processed by the brain, and then simplified/generalized, into an image, at first in its most primitive form, or a concept, attaining the height of a numerical value.

This is where it can acquire a secondary function:
To detach, dismiss, avoid, correct, detach, from the sensual input used to construct it.
This is solipsism at is rawest form. A self-reference begins, as the word, symbolizing an abstraction, can now be looped back to refer to another abstraction.
The real, collected as input, and interpreted (simplified/generalized) as mental-models (abstractions), falls into the background.
Baudrillard refers to this process as a simlacrum of a simualation.
I go further and connect it all the sway back to the Bible, and its obsession with the word.
It's not that there is a God (an absent absolute, referring to an absolute order, a complete past), but that with the bible the word IS God.

The word is authoritarian because it demands total obedience to its shared definition.
It is determining because ti shapes and limits human thinking.
It demands loyalty because the sensual must be denied power - it is cast as the Devil.
The word is malleable and so it is comforting, it offers salvation from the real, to minds who must escape their past/nature.

The only possibility for eliminating the sensual, the experienced, the perceived, is to shame it, turning it into a "sin," or, like in the east, into an "illusion."
It's not that the word fails to adequately describe the real, but that the real is totally false, leaving the word in the void.


Orwell hints, to us, what we need to know.

Orwell, George wrote:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The first quote hints at the contradictions produced by nihilism.
The word, taken literally, rather than figuratively, creates this schism between the noetic and phenomena.

To deal with it the mind compartmentalizes its standards for evaluating what is real and what is not.
This creates the rift, a schisms, which I consider a natural byproduct of modernity.

Orwell, George wrote:

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

The second quote hints at the reversibility of human constructs, since they are now detached form the anchoring, determining, sensual, and become self-referential, and based on human emotional reactions and fabrications, and desires.
With the concept of war, the idea that all life is an agon, a struggle, a battle, a fight, against dissimulation is not explored.
It is posited as only a human practice, making peace a concept promising relief from existential struggles.
the only peace, is death - one "rests in peace" only when the struggle to remain alive is done with.
But now, with the word detached from reality, it becomes an idea(l) implying, with vagueness, what is nowhere in evidence: a state of living death; to be alive and at peace, at the same time.  
A paradox resolves with selective reasoning or compartmentalization.

Orwell, George wrote:

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

In this third, and last, quote, we find a hint at the power of the word.
Once the past has been forgotten, denied, or reinterpreted, by detaching it from experience and connecting it to mental constructs and emotional sensations, the work of human husbandry is almost done.
What remains is to rip identification from perception, so as to reattach it, to human artifices.
This is difficult since the organism, in this case the human being, is a becoming, and most of its processes are unconscious, automatic; one can erase human conscious memory but not genetic memory.

The word, by limiting human conception to the immediate, detaching it from reality, is part of the solution.
Shame, indoctrination, morality, also contribute is slandering self, and turning ego into a vice.

The rest is dealt with using inebriation, and distraction: fatigue (excessive work), sexual obsession (preoccupation with the sex organ), and numbing methods (drugs, alcohol, religion).

Economy

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Previously a term which referred to a 'careful management of available resources'. In times when language and perception were less degraded tools one could observe economies on a natural level, even when human culture is not the specific subject. The adapted behaviour of organisms in their natural habitat could be described as economic in this way: using what they need, sustaining natural balances and relationships.

In our time it has come to refer almost strictly the monetary system which propagates the exact opposite ideal (perpetual growth model). Not only is the 'economy' driven by reckless greed and insatiable largesse, but it also is re-injected with fresh capital whenever it reaches critical levels of imbalance (quantitative easing etc). Using the mangled and manipulated methods of measurement (RPI, CPI, growth targets), all of which prove to be, upon closer inspection, self-referential abstractions with no basis in reality, the concept can be said to exhibit the properties synonymous with the sort of nihilistic inversion which is in abundance in modern discourse.

Economy -
"from oikonomos, manager of a household"

The organization and management of various resources within a system.
While before it was about the management and organization of the physical reality it has by now become a psychological end in itself.

While before society was organized for the ends of organizing physical reality, which, because nature had still teeth at the time formed a feed-back-loop between the organization and the less-artificial reality out there - by now, the management is mostly reduced to the management of the psychology of the members within the artificial environment. And so, yes, most words have become 'self-referential' in the sense that it's about the collective mindset and its management.

Anfang wrote:

Economy -
"from oikonomos, manager of a household"

The organization and management of various resources within a system.
While before it was about the management and organization of the physical reality it has by now become a psychological end in itself.

While before society was organized for the ends of organizing physical reality, which, because nature had still teeth at the time formed a feed-back-loop between the organization and the less-artificial reality out there - by now, the management is mostly reduced to the management of the psychology of the members within the artificial environment. And so, yes, most words have become 'self-referential' in the sense that it's about the collective mindset and its management.

Quite right. The confines of the 'household' no longer impose limitations upon it's own organization. These days the problems of the inner management of the home (business, nation state, banking system) can be resolved by looking outward for more. Print more money, bring in immigrants with higher reproductive rates etc. Solutions relate not to a balancing but to short-term quick-fix numbers games.

Similarly the word consumption (latin: consumere - altogether take up) is not an accurate term for the wasteful spending patterns observed today. To consume or devour entirely (as with food and water) does not reflect modern commercial economics where products with increasingly short shelf-lives are hurriedly purchased and then discarded as they fade into redundancy. Things are not used up in their totality but rather sought in order to satisfy social expectations and conform to fads. In this way they are not absorbed within the individual, but rather, exist as external trinkets and toys to 'add' to the individuals social/external worth for increasingly short periods of time with an increasingly meaningless and dysfunctional 'utility'.

'Buy the Ipad 65.4(bii): A revolution in technology!'

Unsurprisingly women are alleged to be driving this market with 80% of retail purchases. Everything new, fresh and trivial. Keep 'consuming' or you'll be socially alienated.

A home is a place of habituation, a habitat, a habit.
Ethos is the Greek term for tradition, an inherited habit.
Oikos, leads to oikios, the familiar one.
A home is a place, in space/time, where a mind feels familiarity - family.

An abode also indicates a closing-off, a place (space/time) which is held in exclusion ...it excludes, drawing within it what is values.
This is not a detachment, but a separation, a discrimination.
 
Self-referential, solipsism, is the same function only it proceeds to a total detachment.
The movement from partial, discrimination, to total detachment (delusion, solipsism) is only dependent on a power that maintains, excluding, in regards to the external, and organizing, internally.
Find that power in modernity and you've got the underlying power, the directing will.

SuperOrganism, consuming organisms.
The meme devouring genes.



Modernity as Consumerism
To consume is to deconstruct, to destroy, and to then assimilate the parts into a new organization.
Life is this consuming self-organizing part of reality.
To life is to destroy what is alive, and to then be destroyed and assimilated, by another.

Nihilism is this method of internal reorganization of what has been destroyed, cut into pieces, and then selectively devoured.

It is an internal digestive process of a Superorganism, feeding on organisms.
The destruction of identity, the detachment of the organism from its past, from nature, from reality, mirrors the process of killing, masticating, and then swallowing the ground up into fine pieces.
Digestion is the creation of a fine, uniform paste, from where the new organism draws nutrients from – reorganizing the pieces in accordance to its own internal structures.  


It in an internal digestive process.

The area to explore is how the absence of an absolute, a telos, a purpose, an arche defined as 'nihilism' itself is Nihilistic.


To this end, I want to exhaust all the relevant Nietzsche passages. Starting with, the herd belief in Certainty - in Faith - is what prompts this perception of the absence of any absolute as nihilistic...

Nietzsche wrote:

"Believers and their need to believe. - The extent to which one needs a faith in order to flourish, how much that is 'firm' and that one does not want shaken because one clings to it - that is a measure of the degree of one's strength (or, to speak more clearly, one's weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today; hence it still finds believers. For that is how man is: an article of faith could be refuted to him a thousand times; as long as he needed it, he would consider it 'true' again and again, in accordance with that famous 'proof of strength,4 of which the Bible speaks. Metaphysics is still needed by some, but so is that impetuous demandfor certainty that today discharges itself in scientific-positivistic form among great masses - the demand that one wants by all means something to be firm (while owing to the fervour of this demand one treats the demonstration of this certainty more lightly and negligently): this is still the demand for foothold, support - in short, the instinct of weakness that, to be sure, does not create sundry religions, forms of metaphysics, and convictions but does - preserve them.

Indeed, around all these positivistic systems hover the fumes of a certain pessimistic gloom, something of a weariness, fatalism, disappointment, fear of new disappointment - or else self-dramatizing rage, a bad mood, the anarchism of exasperation and whatever other symptoms or masquerades there are of the feeling of weakness. Even the vehemence with which our cleverest contemporaries get lost in pitiful nooks and crevices such as patriotism (I refer to what the French call chauvinisme5 and the Germans 'German'), or in petty aesthetic creeds such as French naturalism (which enhances and exposes only the part of nature that simultaneously disgusts and amazes - today one likes to call it la verite vraie6 - ), or in Petersburg-style nihilism (meaning faith in unbelief to the point of martyrdom), always indicates primarily the need for faith, a foothold, backbone, support . . .

Faith is always most desired and most urgently needed where will is lacking; for I will, as the affect of command, is the decisive mark of sovereignty and strength. That is, the less someone knows how to command, the more urgently does he desire someone who commands, who commands severely - a god, prince, the social order, doctor, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might gather that both world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and especially their sudden spread to a tremendous sickening ofthe will. And that is actually what happened: both religions encountered a demand for a 'Thou Shalt' that, through a sickening of the will, had increased to an absurd level and bordered on desperation; both religions were teachers of fanaticism in times of a slackening of the will and thereby offered innumerable people support, a new possibility of willing, a delight in willing.

For fanaticism is the only 'strength of the will' that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, as a type of hypnosis of the entire sensual-intellectual system to the benefit of the excessive nourish­ ment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling which is now dominant - the Christian calls it his faith. Once a human being arrives at the basic conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes 'a believer'; conversely, one could conceive of a delight and power of self­ determination, afreedom of the will, in which the spirit takes leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, practised as it is in maintaining itself on light ropes and possibilities and dancing even beside abysses. Such a spirit would be thefree spirit par excellence." [JW, 347]

Alternate translation;

Nietzsche wrote:

"How much faith a person requires in order to flourish, how much "fixed opinion" he requires which he does not wish to have shaken, because he holds himself thereby is a measure of his power (or more plainly speaking, of his weakness).  Most people in old Europe, as it seems to me, still need Christianity at present, and on that account it still finds belief.  For such is man: a theological dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times, provided, however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as "true" according to the famous "proof of strength" of which the Bible speaks.  Some have still need of metaphysics; but also the impatient longing for certainty which at present discharges itself in scientific, positivist fashion among large numbers of the people, the longing by all means to get at something stable (while on account of the warmth of the longing the establishing of the certainty is more leisurely and negligently undertaken): even this is still the longing for a hold, a support; in short, the instinct of weakness, which, while not actually creating religions, metaphysics, and convictions of all kinds, nevertheless preserves them.  

In fact, around all these positivist systems there fume the vapours of a certain pessimistic gloom, something of weariness, fatalism, disillusionment, and tear of new disillusionment or else manifest animosity, ill humour, anarchic exasperation, and whatever there is of symptom or masquerade of the feeling of weakness.  Even the readiness with which our cleverest contemporaries get lost in wretched corners and alleys, for example, in Patriotism (I mean what is called chauvinisme in France and "deutsch" in Germany), or in petty aesthetic creeds in the manner of Parisian naturalisme.  (which only brings into prominence and uncovers that aspect of nature which excites simultaneously disgust and astonishment they like at present to call this aspect la verite vraie), or in Nihilism in the St Petersburg style (that is to say, in the belief in unbelief, even to martyrdom for it): this shows always and above all the need of belief, support, backbone, and buttress.  

Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed, where there is a lack of will: for the will, as the affect of command, is the distinguishing characteristic of sovereignty and power.  That is to say, the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for that which commands, and commands sternly, a God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience.  From whence perhaps it could be inferred that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity might well have had the cause of their rise and especially of their rapid extension in an extraordinary collapse and disease of the will.  And in truth it has been so: both religions lighted upon a longing, monstrously exaggerated by malady of the will, for an imperative, a "Thou shalt" a longing going the length of despair; both religions were teachers of fanaticism in times of slackness of will power, and thereby offered to innumerable persons a support, a new possibility of exercising will, an enjoyment in willing.  

For in fact fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system in favour of an excessive nuorishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and a particular feeling which then becomes dominates - the Christian calls it his faith.  When a man arrives at the fundamental conviction that he requires to be commanded he becomes "a believer".  Conversely, one could imagine a delight and a power of self determining and a freedom of will whereby a spirit could bid farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, accustomed as it would be to support itself on slender cords and possibilities and to dance even on the verge of abysses.  Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.  [JW, 347]

Active Nihilism:

Nietzsche wrote:

"One may admit the truth to oneself to the point where one is sufficiently elevated no longer to require the disciplinary school of [moral]," error - When one judges existence morally, it disgusts.

One should not invent unreal persons, e.g., one should not say "nature is cruel." Precisely the insight that no such central responsible being exists is a relief!

Evolution of man.

a. To gain power over nature and in addition a certain power over oneself. (Morality was needed that man might prevail in his struggle with nature and the "wild animal. " )

b. If power has been attained over nature, one can employ this power in the further free development of oneself: will to power as self-elevation and strengthening." [WTP 403]

To a slave, freedom is terrifying, and he prefers to be in chains, to be Led, to be Herded, and hence the absence of a 'God' - nihilism takes on a Nihilistic meaning...

Nietzsche wrote:

"Toward a critique oj the herd virtues. - Inertia operates

(l) in trustfulness, since mistrust makes tension, observation, reflection necessary;-

(2) in veneration, where the diITerence in power is great and submission necessary: so as not to fear, an attempt is made to love, esteem, and to interpret the disparity in power as disparity in value: so that the relationship no longer makes one rebellious;-

(3) in the sense of truth. What is true? Where an explanation is given which causes us the minimum of spiritual effort (moreover, lying is very exhausting);-

(4) in sympathy. It is a relief to count oneself the same as others, to try to feel as they do, to adopt a current feeling: it is something passive com- pared with the activity that maintains and constantly practices the individual's right to value judgments (the latter allows of no rest);-

(5) in impartiality and coolness of judgment: one shuns the exertion of affects and prefers to stay detached, "objective";-

(6) in integrity: one would rather obey an existing law than create a law oneself, than command oneself and others: the fear of commanding-: better to submit than to react;- (7) in toleration: the fear of exercising rights, of judging. [WTP, 279]

One begins to consume otherness, only when this hunger has already fed upon itself.
The organism begins to consume itself, to the point where pain/suffering commences.
Then it is driven, so as to not eat itself alive, to seek nutrition elsewhere.

Have not modern minds been deprived of nutrition to the point where they’ve eaten themselves alive?
Almost dead, they stumble into the world, sniffing for something to fill them up.

Need is how a hungry mind is lead to the slaughterhouse.

Absence of Telos and any abs. Agent is Liberating:

Nietzsche wrote:

"In relation to the vastness and multiplicity of collaboration and mutual opposition encountered in the life of every organism, the conscious world of feelings, intentions, and valuations is a small section. We have no right whatever to posit this piece of conscious- ness as the aim and wherefore of this total phenomenon of life: becoming conscious is obviously only one more means toward the unfolding and extension of the power of life. Therefore it is a piece of naivete to posit pleasure or spirituality or morality or any other particular of the sphere of consciousness as the highest value -and perhaps even to justify "the world" by means of this.

This is my basic objection to all philosophic-moralistic cosmo- and theodicies, to all wheretores and highest values in philosophy and theology hitherto. One kind of means has been misunderstood as an end; conversely, life and the enhancement of its power has been debased to a means.

If we wished to postulate a goal adequate to life, it could not coincide with any category of conscious life; it would rather have to explain all of them as a means to itself-

The "denial of life" as an aim of life, an aim of evolution! Existence as a great stupidity! Such a lunatic interpretation is only the product of measuring life by aspects of consciousness (pleasure and displeasure, good and evil). Here the means are made to stand against the end-the "unholy," absurd, above all unpleasant means-: how can an end that employs such means be worth anything! But the mistake is that, instead of looking for a purpose that explains the necessity of such means, we presuppose in advance a goal that actually excludes such means; i.e., we take a desideratum in respect of certain means (namely pleasant, rational, and virtuous ones) as a norm, on the basis of which we posit what general purpose would be desirable-

The fundamental mistake is simply that, instead of understand- ing consciousness as a tool and particular aspect of the total life, we posit it as the standard and the condition of life that is of supreme value: it is the erroneous perspective of a parte ad tatum" -which is why all philosophers are instinctively trying to imagine a total consciousness, a consciousness involved in all life and will, in all that occurs, a "spirit," "God." But one has to tell them that precisely this turns life into a monstrosity; that a "God" and total sensorium would altogether be something on account of which life would have to be condemned-

Precisely that we have eliminated the total consciousness that posited ends and means, is our great relief - with that we are no longer compelled to be pessimists-

Our greatest reproach against existence was the existence of God-" [WTP, 707]

The Active Nihilist is beyond pleasure/pain hedonism:

Nietzsche wrote:

"The "predominance of suffering over pleasure" or the opposite (hedonism): these two doctrines are already signposts to nihilism.

For in both of these cases no ultimate meaning is posited except the appearance of pleasure or displeasure.

But that is how a kind of man speaks that no longer dares to posit a will, a purpose, a meaning: for any healthier kind of man the value of life is certainly not measured by the standard of these trifles. And suffering might predominate, and in spite of that a powerful will might exist, a Yes to life, a need for this predominance.

"Life is not worthwhile"; "resignation"; "why the tears?"- a weakly and sentimental way of thinking.
"Un monstre gai vaut mieux qu'un sentimental ennuyeux."" [WTP, 35]

Schopenhauer's nihilism:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Schopenhauer as throwback (state before the revolution):

Pity, sensuality, art, weakness of the will, catholicism of spiritual cravings-that is good eighteenth century au fond.'·

Schopenhauer's basic misunderstanding of the will (as if craving, instinct, drive were the essence of will) is typical: lowering the value of the will to the point of making a real mistake. Also hatred against willing; attempt to see something higher, indeed that which is higher and valuable, in willing no more, in "being a subject without aim and purpose" (in the "pure subject free of will"). Great symptom of the exhaustion or the weakness of the will: for the will is precisely that which treats cravings as their master and appoints to them their way and measure." [WTP, 84]

Lack of Self-Organizing Will in the face of an absent absolute:

Nietzsche wrote:

"The question of "happiness," of "virtue," of "salvation of the soul" is the expressiou of physiological contradictoriness in these types of decline: their instincts lack a center of gravity, a purpose." [WTP, 435]

Satyr wrote:

Have not modern minds been deprived of nutrition to the point where they’ve eaten themselves alive?
Almost dead, they stumble into the world, sniffing for something to fill them up.

Self, determined by the past, and blossoming through selective, increasingly self-aware, discrimination of influences, is replaced by an universal blueprint. The blueprint cannot provide substance, it can only try to block the formation of an individual-self which would be connected to the past. The innate substance cannot be replaced, it can only be numbed. The emergence of hunger, because of that felt void, the numbed seed of self, is temporarily appeased by materialism/consumerism/morals.

This leads to a continuous hunger, a need, which can be directed and controlled.

An organism has no conscious while the Superorganism it is part of lives.  Self awareness arises from detachment, the severance which is the effect of the death of the Superorganisms ego.  Nihilism therefore is the organism self aware, but lacking confidence in itself.  Hopeless, terrified, it is unable to cope with the certainty that its existence as ego must too come to an end.  

The secularist/humanist/atheist perspective has turned death into an end where the affirmative perspective sees it as a door.  It becomes a passage way to new life and greater ends, self defined by the deed.  This fear of death is man’s chief fear and so it is the beginning of all questions.  Indeed all laws, all policies and moralities are formed to maximize existence in the present.  

This is why the masses need religion and why once the artifice was torn down by rationalists for their own selfish reasons, man has been in free fall ever since.  
True religion is not the dictates of the word but of the deed and the only true religion places the continuance of life at the beginning and ending of all questions.  All is referenced not from the view point of our own eyes, but from the eyes which yet have come to be.  Economy is nothing but the awareness that a part of life does continue, the constantly arising new generations brought to fruition by the formative power of nature are not seen detached from the self.  From this perspective a nobler outlook arises, traditions and laws reflect the interest of the unborn.  Like the slumbering plant which shoots out its first leaf in early spring in anticipation of the blossom so too does the blossom anticipate the flower and the flower the seed, the Ar-man turns all of his creative energies to the anticipation of his own becoming.  

A people which reject the past also reject the future.  For this future bears with it the inevitable death of the egocentric view.  The present they do find themselves in, being fleeting, becomes a source of resentment, this gives rise to complaint and discontent.  Man today is completely devoured by time, helpless, his principle character is one of the constant critic.      


Life, and the affirmation of life is not found in postulation or critique nor is it examination or dissection for this phenomenon is not explained by words or concepts and to cut it up into pieces is to obliterate the whole, to fall into the trap of reduction.   It exists beyond in the intuitive and sensual perceptions.   This in itself is the pure joy one experiences when they overcome the concrete boundaries of the mind for the unlimited horizons of sensory experience.  This view, destroys all nihilistic tendencies, it gives rise to daring and the pursuit of dangerous activity.  It is the voice which says with true magnanimity,

“Fear not death, it cannot kill you!”      

We could say, the Nihilist fears life precisely because it will kill them.

If you consider it carefully then an organism , on the conscious level of a human, with a still developing identity (self-consciousness) would have to be deconstructed, detached from reality, from nature (past), and refocused upon the immanent, the yet to be, the still to come, the future.

This refocusing, after the mind has been detached from its own past, is how a SuperOrganism would assimilate and integrate, an organism, like the human organism does with the simpler life-form, the cell.
The term "brainwashing" describes this cleansing, this socially produced tabula rasa, which we can associate with the detachment of a mind from itself...its own spirit.

Spirit is defined not as something mystical, but as the past which manifests as a presence.

When we speak of Active Nihilism, we need to focus on two things.

1. The case put forward by many like Detienne/Vernant of the severance of Myth and Logos - the modern abstraction of metaphorical world views, where philosophy and mythology once co-mingled.

2. The absence of any absolute instead of stimulating an Order, veering off into a cultural and existential postmodern Relativism of which Derrida is a classic example.

I intend to look into these two.

Quote :

"The important moment in the history of mythology comes for Detienne not in Xenophanes’ critique, however, but in the defense of the Homeric tradition given by the rhapsodists, the performers of Homer’s epics. Detienne is particularly interested in the rhapsodist Theagnes’ defense of Homer, as it gives the first interpretation of the Iliad, using a form of hermeneutics Porphyrus will eventually label “allegory.” The war between the gods in the Iliad is not meant as a literal account, but as a way to express the opposition between the elements as described by the philosophy of nature: “between the dry and the humid, between the hot and the cold.” Homer merely expresses in poetic meter what philosophers describe using different words.

Detienne marks this defense of Homer as a critical point in the Ancient Greek understanding of mythology, for the simply reason that to interpret Homer, Theagnes must assume the existence of a stable work of Homer’s that can serve as the model for different interpretations, ie. a text fixed in writing. For Detienne, this defense marks the historical origin of the distinction between exegesis and interpretation. Detienne argues that exegesis consists of the ongoing usage of elements within myth and their adaptation to new circumstances. Exegesis gives symbols new and greater meaning by applying them to different situations, such that their signification continually shifts.

Exegesis is the practice whereby myths interact with experiences in a process of mutual enrichment: symbols within myths are used to give significance to experiences, and the specificities of those experiences are added on to the meaning of that symbol. Myths are given meaning through exegesis in “living traditions,” whereas interpretation is the way myth is understood when a group of individuals gain critical distance from the myth. In interpretation, interpreters attempt to grasp the original meaning of a myth beyond the literal grasping of the words within them: as Lévi-Strauss says, “One does not discuss the myths of the group, […] one transforms them in the belief one is repeating them.” (Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Detienne, 68). Theagnes is the first interpreter of Homer rather than an exegete: instead of applying stories, images, and other elements of Homer to illuminate particular situations, he determines the “true” meaning of Homer’s “fictional” narrative by taking recourse in natural philosophical doctrines.

It is therefore Theagnes, not Xenophon, who is the true critic of Homer. Xenophon still accepts the “literal” version of Homer and its exegesis throughout a diffuse tradition of art, whereas Theagnes argues that the words of Homer, what Xenophon worries corrupt the youth, are not Homer’s true meaning, and that the true meaning of Homer’s words are to be found outside of his text in the doctrines of natural philosophy. Theagnes thus inaugurates critical distance from the Homeric tradition, based on written interpretation rather than oral dissemination of the epics. At this time, however, reading and writing are still technologies available only to an elite group of intellectuals. For the vast majority of still illiterate people, interpretation based on a readable text is not an option, so oral transmission remains the norm throughout Greece.

A curious middle ground, however, appears between oral exegesis and written interpretation in figures such as Hecataeus, a “fabricator of accounts (logopoios),” individuals ignored in the comparativist account of Ancient Greek intellectual development (70). The literate Hecataeus collects different versions of traditional stories and compares them, consciously redacting accounts and creating new versions of stories “as they seem true to him.” (Aelian referring to Hecateus, quoted in Detienne, 73). He then recites his new, more probable version of the old story, simultaneously engaging in exegesis, the application of old stories to explain new situations, and interpretation, the finding of the true version of a story based on his own understanding of physics, geography, and human action. Like Theagnes, Hecataeus engages in interpretive practices, but avoids the anxiety surrounding having to defend the morals of old mythology by simply altering it as he sees fit, preserving the elements of tradition he chooses according to rational principles of interpretation. While Theagnes struggles to defend the Homeric tradition in such a way that will eventually petrify it, cutting off the ability to improvise necessary to oral transmission and exegesis, Hecataeus is a “logographer who smiles” (back to the title of this chapter – that Marcel’s a clever one ain’t he?), using the rational tools of hermeneutics to create new myths and orally transmit them, a practice that Plato will attempt to make use of in the Republic."

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The change in the semantics of the word "chaos" itself before dwelling on nihilism...

Quote :

"Understanding the semantic metamorphosis that “chaos” has undergone requires some historical perspective. The word “chaos” might have first been appeared in Western culture in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BC): “At the beginning there was chaos, nothing but void, formless matter, infinite space.” Within the Western tradition, chaos was associated with the unformed, the unthought, the unfilled, the unordered (Chaos Bound 19). At this point in history, chaos was not understood as the opposite of order; chaos simply did not have any relationship to order at all. (Weingart and Maasen 479)

According to Katherine Hayles (Chaos Bound), the tradition that identified chaos as that which existed when the world did not continued at least through the Renaissance. All through the Renaissance, chaos continued to be identified with the lack of differentiation. Over time, the classical suggestion that Chaos is the most ancient of all Gods, the companion of Eros, and the stuff from which the world was made grew gradually obscure.

By the mid‐nineteenth century, the classical view of chaos was replaced primarily by the “thermodynamic” view of chaos, so named because the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which dealt with entropy) cast chaos in an unfavorable light. Order and chaos were set up as binary opposites, with chaos being the inimical phenomenon to be avoided wherever possible. Situated in the same semantic network as entropy, chance, and randomness, chaos carried a negative connotation well into the twentieth century.

From the 1960s onward the work of scientists and mathematicians studying the nonlinear processes at the heart of complex systems began to transform the perception of chaos. In the eyes of chaos theorists, chaos fuels the engine that drives nonlinear, dynamical systems toward more complex forms of order. Chaos straddles the interface between predictable, deterministic order and unpredictable, stochastic randomness. Living organisms exist poised at “the edge of chaos,” where the components of a living system never quite lock into a rigid structure, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either.

The science of chaos reveals a broad range of phenomena that cannot be categorized neatly under the rubrics of “order” and “disorder.” Where quantum mechanics introduced a fundamental “uncertainty” inherent in our attempts to understand micro‐phenomena, chaos theory uncovers an ineradicable “unpredictability” inherent in our efforts to comprehend behaviors at the macro‐ phenomenal level.

As the preceding overviews of nihilism and chaos suggest, cultural constructs like nihilism and chaos are not static, monolithic essences... nihilism and chaos as emergent, evolving cultural entities." [Julio Varela, Vortex to Virus-Myth to Memes]

Quote :

"The emergence of nihilism and chaos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers us a case study in how memes work. Memes are bundles of cultural information that display viral properties, sowing the seeds of reality in the individual minds that make up a culture, sub‐culture, or counterculture. In the case of nihilism and chaos, the ongoing epistemological and ontological revolution initiated by the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the collapse of myth as a totalizing source of meaning, and the transition from a Newtonian, deterministic worldview to a quantum‐relativistic, chaotic worldview transformed the Western cultural landscape, paving the way for the “viral” spread of nihilism and chaos to different intellectual and cultural strata.

According to the model, culture evolves when memes (viral bundles of cultural information) flow from the sociocultural matrix (the evolving aggregate of paradigms and epistemes that define a culture) to individual agents (authors and subjects, in this case).

In negating metaphysically stable foundations (nihilism) and confirming scienceʹs ineradicable inability to predict the behavior of chaotic phenomena, nihilism and chaos have played an significant role in shaping the twentieth centuryʹs aesthetic sensibilities.

The embryonic nihilism that Nietzsche proclaimed in the latter half of the nineteenth century would reach maturity in the twentieth century critical theory of Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Baudrillard. Their body of work highlights the extent to which nihilism and chaos have become ingrained in the postmodern cognitive fabric. Beginning in the late 1960s, Jacques Derrida took up where Nietzsche had left off, mounting a critique of philosophy and language that proved to be fatal to totalizing, logocentric systems. Derrida broke with structuralism and Saussurean linguistics, rejecting the possibility of arriving at general laws that govern all discourses or formal universals that reflect the nature of human knowledge.

For Derrida, the fixed, foundational logos is a ʺmythʺ that has pervaded western thinking. The history of metaphysical thought records the futile attempt to link a ʺtranscendental signifierʺ with a secure, stable ʺtranscendental signifiedʺ (i.e., a logos), yielding fixed, universal meaning in the process. The futility stems from the différance, traces, and supplements that destabilize language and delocalize meaning.

Deleuze and Guattari advocate the primacy of free‐flowing, unfettered desire as a postmodern extension of Nietzschean will to power. The whole western metaphysical tradition, in their estimation, is an exercise in paranoiac libidinal investment, where individual and institutional energies are devoted to the preservation of codes that serve despots and capitalists. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that there is no ʺTruth,ʺ but rather the building up and tearing down of codes by institutions and individuals. Individuals as ʺdesiring machinesʺ are endlessly engaged in the embrace of or flight from such codes.

Baudrillard maintains that we have entered an unprecedented historical period where signifiers obliterate signifieds and are wholly self‐referential. According to Baudrillard, postmodernity is characterized by the proliferation of models and codes that have lost touch with their referential origins and foundations. In Baudrillardʹs words, ʺit is the map that precedes the territory . . . it is the map that engenders the territoryʺ (Simulations 2). The power of images and simulacra is such that in postmodern society, even the Absolute becomes just another simulacrum, disconnected from its referent.

For Claude Shannon, information and entropy were not opposites; they were identical. Shannonʹs equation for information bore a striking similarity to Ludwig von Boltzmannʹs (1909) equation for entropy. In equating information with entropy, Shannon anticipated the postmodern view that proliferating information is associated with the production of entropy. In retrospect, identifying entropy with information allowed entropy to be reconceptualized as the thermodynamic motor driving systems to self‐organization rather than as the heat engine driving the world to heat‐death. Chaos went from being associated with decline and disorder in the modernist sense to being associated with increasing complexity and new life in the postmodernist sense.

The ʺnewʺ interpretation of chaos emerged from twentieth‐century developments in nonlinear dynamical systems theory. Nonlinear dynamical systems are all around us: from dripping faucets to waterfalls to macro‐scale climate changes, the world is populated with systems whose behaviors are unpredictable. The unpredictability stems from the fact that in practice we can never precisely specify the initial conditions of these systems. Small errors made in specifying the initial state of such systems are magnified exponentially, what Edward Lorenz called the ʺbutterfly effect.ʺ These errors, no matter how small, grow rapidly and dominate the future behavior of systems. Consequently, the slightest ignorance about the state of the system at any one time will make prediction of the future behavior impossible.

While prediction of future system behavior is impossible, multidimensional (defined as three or more dimensions), nonlinear systems display a kind of ʺboundedʺ indeterminacy. Feedback mechanisms within the system constrain the effects of perturbations on the system, causing the system to turn back onto itself.

Historically, classical myths and logocentric philosophy served as basins of attraction that ordered and stabilized western cultural systems. The depreciation of myths and subversion of philosophical foundations that characterized the twentieth century represent a phase transition toward a more dynamic, turbulent cultural system.

According to Baudrillard, the ʺviral contamination of things by imagesʺ constitutes the signature characteristic of postmodern culture. For Baudrillard, the genetic code has usurped the religious and metaphysical codes of previous eras. As a consequence, the postmodern identity no longer finds stability in religious or secular/philosophical values. As a virtual mutant, the postmodern subject undergoes ceaseless transformation via seduction by the endless blitz of simulacra.

Derridean deconstruction uses the trace and the supplement to emphasize the susceptibility of philosophical systems and textual codes to the mutating power of metaphor. As an undecidable presence/absence built in to the very fabric of language, the trace subverts the apparent stability of texts, triggering a play of signifiers that opens the text to multiple interpretations. Perceived meanings are the by‐products of traces from previous experiences, which, in turn, where shaped by traces of yet other previous experiences, ad infinitum. The trace network paradoxically appears solid on the one hand, yet ephemeral on the other.

Equally paradoxical, the supplement is an entity that both adds to and replaces elements in the text. For Derrida, the supplement escapes the textual system and at the same time installs itself within it, derailing any attempts to arrive at a facile, monovalent reading of the work in question. Working in concert, the supplement and the trace undermine any sort of Modernist/Vorticist vision of the artist as the still point of the vortex. Poundʹs ʺprimary pigment,ʺ indeed the Modernist quest to arrive at a pure essence, is reduced to a fiction when seen from the Derridean perspective.

Différance is the source of all difference, but it is not an origin in the traditional theological sense because it is not fixed (it is never entirely knowable or identifiable as a single point of authority because the moment we think we have it pinned down it is no longer différance but its logocentric inscription) . . . it can never be reached but is instead constantly deferred, always just out of reach. (McQuillan 18)

Derrida posits that the concept is only meaningful through its expression as a signifier; because the signifier is arbitrary and conventional, the concept itself is unstable. In the eyes of Derrida, the instability of the Sausurrean signifier/signifiedsign is a product of différance. No fixed distinction between signifiers and signifieds exists because the structure of the sign is determined by what Derrida calls traces. Neither simply present nor simply absent, the trace occupies a liminal space. The trace is what loosely binds any system of signs, so that at any one moment, a given sign works by referring to other signs not now present. The relay of differences between signifiers depends upon a structural undecidability, a play of presence and absence at the origin of meaning (Collins and Mayblin 70). In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida elaborates:

The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace. Effacement must always be able to overtake the trace; otherwise it would not be a trace but an indestructible and monumental substance. In addition, and from the start, effacement constitutes it as a trace‐‐‐effacement establishes the trace in a change of place and makes it disappear in its appearing, makes it issue forth from itself in its very position.

The play of the trace is a kind of deforming, reforming slippage which gives rise to an instability that language cannot escape. For Derrida, full, replete presence is impossible because of the traceʹs constant sliding between presence and absence. The sign must be studied ʺunder erasure,ʺ always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such (Sarup 34). The semantic flux produced by différance and traces represents a defining symptom of the language virus that William Burroughs (chapter 4) and Derrida explore in their respective works.

Derrida: The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication . . . it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding. (Brunette and Wills, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts 12)

Différance continually delocalizes meaning along a chain of signifiers; we cannot be precise about its exact position because it is never tied to one particular sign. Meaning will never stay the same from context to context; the signified will be altered by the various chains of signifiers in which it is entangled.

Derridaʹs project of deconstruction, while not a formal, critical analysis of mythology (like the projects of a Frazer or a Levi‐Strauss), did attack western philosophy, revealing logocentrism to be a myth inherent in the very fabric of western philosophy. According to Derrida, the history of western thought records the longing for a ʺtranscendental signifierʺ which would directly correspond to a secure, stable ʺtranscendental signifiedʺ (i.e. a logos), yielding fixed, universal meaning in the process. Throughout his body of work, Derrida deconstructs concepts such as God, Idea/Form, Essence and Truth in his attack on western thought.

Différance precludes the possibility of transcendental signifieds and signifiers.

In his ʺIntroductionʺ to Deconstruction: A Reader, Martin McQuillan elaborates on how différance inhabits the tissues of language and renders it unstable: ʺdifférance structures language (or any other system of difference) and makes the idea of structure impossible because structures depend upon a fixed point of originʺ (18).

Différance operates according to a logic of supplementarity that enables différance to create differential relations in language while interrupting any simple idea regarding the stability of these relations. For Derrida, the supplement is that which escapes the system and at the same time installs itself within the system to demonstrate the impossibility of the system. Metaphors and metaphorical language put this supplementarity on display.

Metaphor is not a discrete unit of rhetoric but the general condition of language and thus of thought itself because thinking only ever takes place within language. If all thought is metaphorical (and there is no fixed limit to the field of metaphor), then there is no anchor of stable origin for any concept (beauty, fate, war, drugs, etc.), but merely a chain of metaphors constantly referring to other metaphors. (McQuillan 20)

If no point of origin for any concept exists, no metaphysical presence in language, then the linguistic representation of a fundamental, immutable ʺrealityʺ is impossible. Language, as Derrida conceives it, would amount to an unbounded set of metaphors referring only to one another, a free‐for‐all of signifiers playing in the absence of a metaphysical foundation. In short, Derridean deconstruction reinforces the Nietzschean perspectivism that first appeared in the late nineteenth century. By way of différance, the trace, and the supplement, Derrida presents his postmodern audience with ideas that resonate with Nietzsche’s vision of a dynamic, groundless abyss and extend his nihilistic tenor into the realm of literary analysis. As a result, language represents a turbulent mélange of traces and supplements that leads to polysemic discourses and hermeneutic chaos.

In The Transparency of Evil (1993), Baudrillard expounds upon the emergence of fourth order or fractal simulacra in our contemporary society. We live embroiled in a semiotic free‐for‐all, characterized by the implosion of meaning and the conversion of signification “into an uncontrollable metonymic and ‘viral’ proliferation in all directions to infinity” (Genosko Baudrillard and Signs XVI).

At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage, there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking, there is now no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value. (The Transparency of Evil 5)

Baudrillard glosses on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle when he describes the difficulty inherent in making value judgments in the postmodern age: “it is as impossible to make estimations between beautiful and ugly, true and false, or good and evil, as it is simultaneously to calculate a particle’s speed and position.” (The Transparency of Evil 5‐6).

A crucial turn (for the purposes of this study) comes when chaos is envisioned not as an absence or void but as a positive force. Between 1960 and 1980, cultural fields were configured so as to energize questions about how stochastic variations in complex systems affected the evolution and stability of these systems. In the assigning of a positive value to chaos, information theories and technologies played central roles. In addition to creating the necessary technological landscape, they laid the theoretical foundation for conceptualizing chaos as a dynamic presence rather than an absence.

Information theory, which first emerged in the late 1940s, posits that to understand nature one must examine not only matter and energy, but information as well. Information represents a universal principle at work in the world, specifying the particular character of living and non‐living forms and helping to determine the patterns of mind and human thought.

A significant step in the change of perspective regarding chaos came with the separation of information from meaning. Once this distinction was made, the way was open for information to be defined as a mathematical function that depended solely on the distribution of message elements, independent of whether the message had any meaning for a receiver. This step in turn made it possible to see chaotic systems as rich in information rather than poor in order. The more chaotic a system is, the more information it produces. This perception is at the heart of the transvaluation of chaos, for it enables chaos to be conceived as an inexhaustible ocean of information.

In his Theory of Heat (1871), James Clerk Maxwell created a thought experiment where he envisioned a microscopic being that could separate fast molecules from slow molecules in a closed system. “Maxwell’s Demon,” as the thought experiment came to be known, posited that the “Demon” is a liminal figure who stands at the threshold that separates “an ordered world of will from the disordered world of chaos.” (Hayles Chaos Bound 43)

If the demon could unmix the mixed molecules of a gas, sorting fast ones into one compartment and slow ones into another by opening and shutting a perfect, frictionless door, he could achieve the result ruled impossible by thermodynamics and reverse an irreversible process. For the sake of argument, the demon was supposed not to use any energy when opening or shutting the sliding door. (Campbell Grammatical Man 48)

As conceived by Maxwell, the “Demon” was in principle capable of violating the second law of thermodynamics, generating order rather than increased entropy in its sorting exercise. For several decades, “Maxwell’s Demon” intrigued generations of scientists who attempted to answer the question: “Is information by itself enough to reduce the entropy of a system and make its energy accessible and useful again?”(Campbell 48)

In a 1929 paper entitled “On the Decrease in Entropy . . . by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings,” Leo Szilard observed that to do his work the “Demon” needed to remember where the fast and slow molecules were stored. Szilard showed that the “Demon,” simply in the act of obtaining information about molecules, creates at least as much entropy as would be eliminated by sorting the molecules into separate compartments. Szilard’s crucial insight, that there exists a relationship between information and entropy, would not receive much attention until French physicist Leon Brillouin resurrected Szilard’s paper in his own work (1951).

In reexamining Szilard’s paper, Brillouin declared that information is defined as “negentropy,” a real, physical commodity with as much concreteness as work, heat, and energy. Brillouin’s conclusion pitted information against entropy as an entity that could combat the encroachment of disorder.

Where Brillouin had envisioned information and entropy as opposites carrying opposite signs, Shannon saw these two entities as identical. Shannon anticipated the contemporary view that proliferating information is associated with the production of entropy. Shannon’s definition of entropy allowed randomness to be reconceptualized as maximum information and chaos to be envisioned as the source of all that is new in the world.

In “Science and Method” (1908), Poincaré wrote:

If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment, but even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.

Several decades later, Edward Lorenz would draw similar conclusions when he tried to model the earth’s weather. Lorenz thought that he could capture the essence of how weather changes through three nonlinear differential equations. Benefiting from an instrument that Poincaré did not possess (the computer), Lorenz was able to tinker with the data he put into the system and noticed that small discrepancies in the initial values introduced to the equations led to patterns that were quite different from the original computation. In his 1963 paper “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Lorenz arrived at what would thereafter be known as the “butterfly effect”: a dynamical system that exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions will produce markedly different solutions for two specifications of initial states that are initially very close together.

It implies that two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states. If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state, and in any real system such errors seem inevitable, an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible. (“Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow” 133)

N. Katherine Hayles (Chaos Bound) makes the case that two main schools of thought exist which use distinct modes of analysis and support different views regarding the meaning of chaos theory.

In the first, chaos is seen as order’s precursor and partner, rather than as its opposite. The focus here is on the spontaneous emergence of self‐organization from chaos; or, in the parlance of the field, on the dissipative structures that arise in systems far from equilibrium, where entropy is high. The realization that entropy‐ rich systems facilitate rather than impede self‐organization was an important turning point in the contemporary reevaluation of chaos [. . .] The second branch emphasizes the hidden order that exists within chaotic systems. Chaos in this usage is distinct from true randomness, because it can be shown to contain deeply encoded structures called “strange attractors.” Whereas truly random systems show no discernable pattern when they are mapped into phase space, chaotic systems contract to a confined region and trace complex patterns within it. (9‐10)

Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, a pioneer in the study of complexity, believes that a robust theory of evolution must encompass the roles of both self‐organization and Darwinian natural selection. Interested in the emergence of order in evolutionary systems, Kauffman maintains that self‐ organization is a natural property of complex genetic systems: “There is ‘order for free’ out there, a spontaneous crystallization of order out of complex systems, with no need for natural selection or any other external force” (Lewin 24‐25). While self‐organizing networks arise spontaneously and naturally because of the laws of complexity, natural selection finds its role as the shaper of “order for free” (Kauffman 90‐91), molding the structures of these systems so that they are poised on “the edge of chaos.”

Kauffman believes that Darwin was not wrong as much as there are things he simply could not have known, like the self‐organizing properties of complex systems and the role of genetics in evolution. In the postmodern period, other scientists have modified Darwinian orthodoxy in light of Post‐Darwinian findings and discoveries." [Varela, Myth to Memes]

Wow!!

Language as a Memetic Virus.

Quote :

"The literary universe that Burroughs inhabits has forsaken the idea of the almighty Author relying on the power of language to arrive at some essential truth about the human condition. The structural integrity of the vortex is gone, replaced by the postmodernist view of language as an unruly, mutating entity whose power to signify lies beyond the control of the author.

"We are all tainted with viral origins. The whole quality of human consciousness [. . .] is basically a virus mechanism." (Cities of the Red Night 25)

"I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. It will be seen that the falsifications in syllabic Western languages are in point of fact actual virus mechanisms. The IS of identity is in point of fact the virus mechanism [. . .] The categorical THE is also a virus mechanism, locking you in THE virus universe. EITHER/OR is another virus formula. It is always you OR the virus, EITHER/OR. This is in point of fact the conflict formula which is seen to be an archetypical virus mechanism."(Word Virus 312)


For William Burroughs, identity is ultimately a symptom of parasitic invasion, the expression within the subject of forces originating from outside: ʺlanguage is a virus from outer space.ʺ Long before Richard Dawkins theorized about ʺselfish genesʺ and coined the term ʺmemesʺ to describe units of cultural transmission, William Burroughs understood that words were viruses.

And what then is the written word? My basic theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. (ʺThe Electronic Revolution, Part One: Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Edenʺ 2)

Burroughsʹs word virus and Dawkinsʹs meme share a trait. Like the meme, the purpose of Burroughsʹs word virus is not to indicate or communicate any particular content, but merely to replicate itself. Word viruses and memes are reproductive machines, containing all the information needed for their own replication.

In novels such as Cities of the Red Night, The Ticket That Exploded, Naked Lunch, and The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs frequently writes about viruses as ʺsimply very small units of sound and imageʺ (Word Virus 301) that ʺcan be made to order in the laboratoryʺ (Word Virus 303), a fictional foreshadowing of the meme concept that Dawkins would later develop.

In The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs speculates that word viruses may once have been healthy neural cells, but now are parasitic organisms that invade and damage the central nervous system (49). The novel portrays language as an infectious agent, penetrating consciousness, often causing unspeakable horror and death. Words come to represent everything that is alien or artificial to the human organism.

Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub‐ vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. In the beginning was the word. (49‐50)

Burroughs asserted that as parasitic organisms, word viruses impose ʺimage and soundtrackʺ (Word Virus 301) on susceptible hosts, against the will of the subjects. Summarizing Burroughs, Shaviro states:

"Our bodies are never ourselves, our words and texts never really our own. They arenʹt ʺus,ʺ but the forces which crush us, the norms to which we have been subjected." (ʺTwo Lessons from Burroughsʺ 38)

"A virus has no morals [. . .] and similarly the language virus has no meanings [. . .] It is not ʹIʹ who speaks, but the virus inside me." (42)

Burroughsʹ chilling memorandum, ʺTechnical Deposition of the Virus Powerʺ (Word Virus 275), suggests that unspecified, sinister forces have mastered and harnessed the power of the word virus, unleashing it upon the human population with enough ʺvarietyʺ to keep humanity forever guessing at the ʺmeaningʺ and ʺoriginsʺ of the virus. In this passage, Burroughs foreshadows the awesome power of twentieth century, sound‐and‐image‐driven communication technologies. Those who have the power over these technologies can spread thought and/or image contagions throughout a population because the information being disseminated is quasi‐animate and viral, fully capable of infecting their unsuspecting hosts. Burroughsʹs narrator tells us of the technologically‐induced mutations made to the already unstable word virus that make it exceedingly difficult to decipher, prompting scientists and critics to attribute the inscrutability to the ʺrichness of natureʺ and the polyvalence of texts.

Like Burroughs, Jean Baudrillard makes frequent use of biological metaphors to expound on the human condition. In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard concludes: ʺman is nothing but a dirty little germ‐‐‐an irrational virus marring a universe of transparencyʺ (61). The view that humanity is a virus is made possible because ʺthe religious, metaphysical or philosophical definition of being has given way to an operational definition in terms of the genetic codeʺ (The Ecstasy of Communication 50).

We are in a system where there is no more soul, no more metaphor for the body‐‐‐the fable of the unconscious itself has lost most of its resonance. No narrative can come to metaphorize our presence; no transcendence can play a role in our definition [. . .] This having been established, there are no more individuals, but only potential mutants. From a biological, genetic, and cybernetic point of view, we are all mutants. (The Ecstasy of Communication 50‐51)

The chaotic self is, according to Hofstadter, the most complex of all symbols in the mind, a renormalized, feedback‐driven entity in constant communication with the vast ensemble of symbols and subsystems stored in the brain (Gödel, Escher, Bach 385). By way of strange loops and tangled hierarchies, the “I” or self maintains a delicate, dynamic equipoise by locking‐in to its chaotic attractor. The welter of sensory data streaming in from the outside world and the constant feedback flowing between the symbols and ideas that make up the psyche serve as inputs in the self’s search for its most stable configuration.

"With each individual forming its own optimal self‐configuration based on cultural inputs and biological parameters, “reality” refers to a proliferation of processes in flux rather than a fixed objective concept for the whole human population. Argyros argues that the more sophisticated an entity’s capacities to receive, store, manipulate, and transmit information, the more world it has at its disposal." (A Blessed Rage for Order 131)

Memes influence dramatically the amount of world an individual has at its disposal. True polymaths, on the order of a Joyce, Beckett, or Pynchon, can perceive a more complex “reality” thanks in part to a memetic storehouse of varied cultural knowledge that far exceeds that of most individuals. This storehouse changes the way an artist like Joyce looks at the phenomenon of memory. The chaotic flow of perceptions and memories we encounter in Joyce’s characters amounts to a choreography of the dance taking place among and between the memetic attractors vying for a position within the characters’ streams of consciousness.

“Remembering” is no longer an act of volition carried out by a subject, but rather an event produced subconsciously by the interactions between memes and memeplexes in response to an environmental trigger."[Varela, Vortex to Virus:Myth to Memes]

I don't think the word, language, was a virus, or a virus carrier, to begin with.
It morphed into one over time, and it changed due to environmental conditioning.

Population explosions, due to sheltering, and the need to control and to establish centralized value, by constructing value standardization, on resources, is what made the word from a method of relating to reality into a method of detaching from it.

Language begins as an adaptation of the primate social grooming mechanism.
A way of reaffirming and establishing and maintaining internal relationships and hierarchies.
As the group grew towards the proportions we find in modern times (globalization) this grooming morphed to meet the challenge of integrating, and placating multiplicities into one stable whole.

The word, language in general, including math, became a carrier of monism, the all-uniforming, all-inclusive, lowest-common-denominator...the vague undefined, nowhere in evidence singularity.
The word had to detach from any real referential point because this singularity was nowhere to be found except within the human mind, where it remained so vague, and mysterious, that it had to become a Deity.

The christian trinity represents this mystifying unity which incorporates the mind/body and the connector, the spirit, which is nothing more than emotion.

Sensation morphs into emotion when self-consciousnesses is felt as a detachment form consciousness, as something other than it.
I think this is what Jaynes called his Bicameral Mind, and attributed it to a primitive form of emergent self-consciousness.

Emotion being this nexus between mind and body, becomes the perfect representation of the spirit...

This is to describe the 2. point I was making - from Derrida to Burroughs, there is total divorce of word and reference,,, only differance, only a virus now that destabilizes everything, only a relativism to usher in the free-for-all abuse of 'perspectivism' into passive nihilism of the extreme leftist kind.