SUPERCONVERSATIONS DAY 65: BRADLEY KAYE RESPONDS TO ALEKSANDR SVYATOGOR “OUR AFFIRMATIONS”
#Who Is Leading the Interplanetary Vanguard in a Line of Flight from Death?
Infinity Symbol (source).
Death by human hands seems to be the most common reason for our accelerated decrepitude; vast majority of health problems can be cleared up through better nutrition, active lifestyle, and having less stress in our lives. I would welcome acceleration of logistics and technology if these are used as pathways to bring us closer to life. Acceleration without busy-ness idle chatter gossip and unfruitful chit chat that does not matter. Accelerate words that matter and maybe we will accelerate lives that also matter. All social evolution has an immediate impact on our actual material organic composition as human beings. Unfortunately now, health and well-being is nihilistically dictated by the sadistic death throes of insane market forces that do really obnoxious idiotic things that have nothing to do with actual health like pharmaceutical sales contests and building billions of dollars in research to cure cancer which makes it extremely profitable to do this nihilistic research endlessly, when there are tangible cures to cancer that communist countries like East Germany and Cuba have known about; like Shark Cartilage, and the way the FDA killed B-17 research in the seventies because it actually kills cancer cells, and Turmeric brings down cell inflammation and Reishi Mushrooms make you 75% less likely to die of cancer; and Pau d’Arco makes women 80% less likely to get breast cancer and on and on. These are in the commons because these are plants anyone can grow and there is no patent on plants (yet!); these are available very very cheap, and most people can afford access to these things and even grow them on their own. Health needs to get back to the soil not run off into space.
This is the new metaphysics of immortality in space; but it is now hardened into fact rather than opinion, which makes it even more horrifying and fascinating. The belief is that we can actualize our immortality as something more than a utopian dream. It is said that Thales was the first philosopher of metaphysics and one anecdote about him has been passed down for ages. He was the first person to accurately predict a lunar eclipse and at night he would wander around gazing at the starry night. One time he was so transfixed by the immense beauty of the stars that he wandered and fell into a well. An elderly woman saw this and mocked him, “Thales, you are so concerned about the stars in the heavens, you fail to put one foot in front of the other.” I feel we may die as a species staring at the immense beauty of the stars, like some forlorn condescending Neil de Grasse Tyson, Michio Kaku wannabes idolizing the messianic powers of science while remaining strangers to ourselves, and our neighbors, and our lovers, and children, and have this all-encompassing news-centered nihilistic idle talk devoid of truth. Metaphysics always forgets its grounding when all that is solid melts into outer space. Did you hear that Neil de Grasse Tyson breathed the idea that Pluto was too small to matter and voila, Pluto is no longer a planet? Who is he to say that and why is he an authority on Pluto? It is so scientifically Platonic to quantify the planetary aptitude of Pluto.
Would we even know what to do with our immortality? Would we know what to do with our liberation from the oppression of time spent in work? If we accelerate beyond work it is feasible that everyone would be better off; we could read poetry, study literature, exercise more, have fun off the clock, pursue any sort of personal self-enhancement project, heck, we may have more sex and more pleasurable sex because it is not conditioned by the repression of work; it would liberate ‘sex’ from being the ‘sex industry’ where professionals get paid to compulsively have sex without joy (to borrow from the Big Lebowski); this is great we would have a world flooded with unprofitable but immensely enriching activities like more crappy poetry and terrible art, but what is wrong with that? Invent new sports and hobbies that have nothing to do with money and the metaphysics of scarcity.
Maybe we would do these things outside the context of ‘professionalism’ and ‘grades’ for a degree and just enjoy it like a five year old in art class who does not give a damn about whether their finger painting resembles impressionism because a professor is grading them out of condescension for their own failed ambitions. Maybe we would liberate a few diamonds in the rough who are simply wasting away as cogs in this fascist death machine that enriches someone else by funneling our attention into making/consuming widgets all day.
If we lose our death would that fact bring back our joy? After the first ten billion years, after Super Bowls run out of roman numerals - just going out on a limb - we may get bored. Life continuing beyond the initial fascination with life is an unfathomable situation for me, especially living in capitalism where every day we are told the world reinvents the wheel. Maybe immortality would help our attention spans, we die too soon these days, and it is not like we really live when most of our lives are hobbled in cubicles in obesity slapping together this grim Last Man fear of death that clings to life out of sheer inertia and horrifying pharmaceutical drugs that prolong our deaths in a drawn out pathetic state of unhealthy anti-vitalism. I want to be free, that is why I study philosophy, but unfortunately, freedom is totally unprofitable in a telos of fear. Sometimes you have to be driven almost to the brink of death to have this realization that maybe life is worth preserving. I am unsure how there will be any sacred dimension to life once it is no longer a scarce temporal resource. Death is the big Aporia coming around the bend that we accelerate through planned ignorance. Do we want to be merely machines or do we want to be sacred? Life without a touch of the mystical is dull.
One can argue, and I think Michel Foucault has done this time and time again, the entire field of medicine was founded on exactly this principle. Curing every illness and a utopian gesture where death is completely ameliorated, but I am reminded of this horrifying Borges story “The Immortal” – where the entire idea of immortality becomes completely undesirable as a social outcome. In this story, we have a whole civilization of immortals living forever, and since there is an infinity of time at their disposal, every single one of them sits around in total apathy completely procrastinating all the time. It is as if Borges is saying, once we liberate ourselves from the oppression of time and open it up from its finitude into the infinite; that, even in capitalism we are so unaccustomed to being totally free with our time and our lives that we squander what little time we have with really (if I may) nauseatingly absurd nonsense. Tabloids and small talk, the idle chatter of gossip, rather than going full throttle into creative and personal self-enhancement. I do think that this is simply symptomatic of a capitalist temporality that virtually everyone has absorbed to some extent: produce or die. Literally meaning, you work, or you piss away the rest of your time because leisure time is a waste of time, the conclusion being: Time is money. Either you make money or you had just better go away and die.
In this article on space travel I am reminded of this famous song that is all over the radio stations lately, Lampshades on Fire by Modest Mouse. For some reason, this song hits the cynical nihilistic nail of our times on the head; what happens after the orgy, to paraphrase Baudrillard, “everyone is partying, but what happens when the money runs out?” If we go to space and simply transport our capitalist ‘no rules’ ethos, we will ‘go to space, and find another planet, make the same mistakes’, Maybe aliens are annoyed by us which is why they observe at a distance, fear of full on confrontation with these violent human beings, the whole galaxy is dark trying to turn off the lights and put us to sleep out of sheer aversion. In the future we may learn to have pleasant dreams again.
It takes commitment to elevate oneself to the realm of immortal; can we do this with everyone? Take caution in inter-planetary acceleration - the natives may be hostile, because Richard Branson is now selling tickets to the moon, and who the hell wants capitalism to be the interspace vanguard?
We all get distracted and that is not a bad thing; there is a revelation about our subconscious neurosis that is revealed in our distractions; and this impulse to go to space to me smacks of the total alienation that one has in daily life. It is not necessarily this big Lacanian-Zizekian point that we all lack something in the Real; no, the neurosis, the dysfunction, the alienation is completely preventable if we see reality for what it is; truth is an error – but that does not mean that these errors cannot be forgiven and overcome. Life is an error; it is a comma inside a parenthesis surrounded by the abyss of Nothingness; but we are never empiricists who realize facts and have objective knowledge; truth is a matter of how we use myth and ideology to fill in the gaps in this nothing to make ourselves feel secure again. Lacan is a genius no doubt, but his entire philosophy can be summed up that the point de capiton the famous ‘quilting point’ is nothing more than stitching up a security blanket on the way to tuck us in with a Utopian bedtime as if we are infantilized as scared children. It is best to liberate the time of women. We have liberated women from sex as reproduction through birth control which has given back some semblance of feminine recreation in sex. If we can admit there is an essence then we can admit wholeheartedly that the liberation of time would do drastic things to liberate women from the drudgery of repressed household responsibility, women could then be like men, and enjoy life as selfish narcissists who have a room to write poetry, which seems like a luxury during childrearing years. If we can extend life by taking away death this would immediately expand the liberation of women by giving more years to pursue recreational activities and be irresponsible without shame.
It seems the accelerationists ignore the problem that comes with the liberation of time. It is that there will be an explosion of lives into possibly unsustainable over population especially coupled with the expansion of resource exploitation due to the expansion of life longevity. One life will immediately become unsustainable for the planet if it continues infinitely, but also, infinite time without work, means many people will squander this surplus of time. Work is one aspect of life that creates some dimension of repression during the day. Some portion of the population will squander their time doing meth. It seems tragic, but then, maybe if we created a world that was not worth escaping maybe we could cut down on phantasies of lines of flight led by the interplanetary vanguard, out of our death.
Bradley Kaye is an adjunct philosophy professor at Villa Maria College of Buffalo and the author of two books: Critical Madness Theory, and The Boundless Open Sea.
