This is the afterword for Network Notion #1: Semiotics of the End by Alessandro Sbordoni.

‘In a way, we must start at the end.’

Deleuze and Guattari[1]

This statement from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus brings us to a strange conclusion. If we are to start at the end, which way should we turn? If we stare for too long into the abyss of hypernothingness what will we see? To take Nietzsche seriously is to see our own reflection; to see the monster we have become, or have always been. The industrial technologies of contemporary capitalism have only served to bring this monster further out of the depths. The end is always there, looming in the darkness.

However, there is another way. A light at the end of the tunnel. A new beginning.

Some thinkers, writing in the twentieth century have been prophetic in terms of their predictions about the age we currently live in (e.g., Jean Baudrillard, Bifo Berardi), and some have acutely diagnosed the problems of the twenty-first century from inside, surrounded by the constant flux of texts and images we find ourselves immersed in every day (e.g., Mark Fisher, Byung-Chul Han). Writers like Alessandro Sbordoni occupy a unique position because their ideas have been profoundly shaped by those who came before them, yet they are part of a world that the previous generation of thinkers could only analyse from afar. In other words, they are a new generation of digital natives, analysing techno-culture from within.

‘The end,’ as Sbordoni conceptualizes it in this book, is both the symbolic embodiment of nothingness, and the grounding for what could be. In this regard it is reminiscent of the second division of Being and Time[2] in which Heidegger addresses the dual nature of death as the necessary end of Dasein, and as the condition for the possibility of Dasein’s existence. The end, for Heidegger, is present from the beginning.

As Bernard Stiegler explains in the documentary film The Ister:

Mortality according to Heidegger is what makes my time mine such that it cannot be shared with another — nobody can die in my place — and such that it is totally indeterminate. This will lead Heidegger to say that time must be thought from the perspective of the future. My death always remains “still to come.” And hence a magnificent paradox: my death is the sole event I will never live. […] So it’s nothing but a phantom. It has never been and it will never arrive. There are nothing but phantasms.[3]

Death, the ultimate end, is therefore nothing but a phantasm for us. Hypernothingness exists only insofar as it is hyperreal. Time must be thought from the future. After the boredom at the end of the world, the only thing left to do is forge a way forward. Dreams of the end are only the start…

Thinking Time From the Future

There is a remarkable shift that happens in our consciousness when we truly understand Heidegger’s lesson iterated by Stiegler in the quote above. To think of time from the future implies a whole host of existential and political questions, some of which are the most pressing we face today.

Whereas Stiegler claims that our own death only exists as a phantasm (something that will never truly happen to us), Mark Fisher’s hauntology, taken from the same Derridean language, sees that culture has reached an impasse: we are trapped in an endless cycle of stagnation in which lost futures continually haunt us from the past. In both cases the phantasm is real in the Deleuzian sense.[4] Despite its virtuality, it exists here, now, in the present. Thus, as Sbordoni explains, this endless cycle is precisely the signification of the end itself.

Nevertheless, there is a reason why anti-hauntology was chosen as the final chapter of this book: anti-hauntology specifically emphasizes thinking time from the future. It implies the creation of a new future. It shows us a way out. Indeed, if we take Fisher’s hauntology as the cultural embodiment of the end, anti-hauntology must necessarily represent the logic of new beginnings. As I wrote in 2021, ‘if hauntology is the logic of despair, then anti-hauntology can be seen as the logic of hope.’[5]^,[6]

But what exactly is the operation of this new logic? Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? Here we can combine Stiegler’s theory of (trans)individuation with the accelerationist concept of hyperstition to provide an answer.

Create New Circuits!

In a 2009 interview, Nick Land summarized the concept of hyperstition, a concept that truly puts ‘thinking time from the future’ at its core. The curious thing about hyperstitional objects is (despite their ephemeral nature) their ability to affect real world change, for better or worse. As Land states:

Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality […]. The hyperstitional object is no mere figment of “social construction”, but is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it.[7]

We have seen, time and again, these hyperstitional objects actualising themselves from the future into the present. Most recently with Meta’s contemporary reconstruction of the ‘metaverse’ from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. In this case, one of the most powerful and far reaching social technology platforms decided to rebrand itself in order to focus on recreating a speculative virtual reality from a science fiction bestseller. The fictional metaverse contributed to its own actualization in the present. Neo-California arrives from the future.[8]

Now, if this kind of change can be affected in the realm of capital through fictional circuits from future to present, what could happen in the realm of techno-culture? What happens when new musical ideas, enabled by new technologies, paint new visions of the future? Suddenly there’s a break in the darkness. The world opens up. New circuits can be re-wired. A new epokhe can be formed.

As Stiegler writes in What Makes Life Worth Living:

An epokhe […] is formed via multiple circuits of transindividuation[9] through which psychic individuals co-individuate and ultimately transindividuate. This transindividuation is a matter of weaving transgenerational circuits according to the paths of every form of knowledge.[10]

Stiegler’s concept of transindividuation (which is adopted and expanded from Simondon’s transindividual) is about how groups of individuals collectively adopt a common past in order to project a common future and invent new ways of living. Knowledge is no longer short-circuited. Long circuits are formed across generations. Transindividuation means reaching beyond the end; reaching beyond the short-termist thinking that contemporary industrial capitalism has burdened us with; reaching for a new future in which knowledge is thought of not just in terms of its capacity to change the present, but its capacity to bring about a future we want to live in.

Anti-hauntology, in this sense, can be thought of as the formation of a new epokhe in the realm of culture, through transindividuation. As experimental music has started to be pushed into the mainstream, it has reached out to other ‘well established’ genres, inviting popular artists to draw on these sounds in innovative new ways. This move essentially means that the experimental, the avant-garde, and the popular have developed a new relationship that would have been much more difficult to imagine even a short while ago.[11]  Why is this important? Because it enables the creation of transgenerational circuits between the present and the future. The mere imagining of the new can be enough to bring about its own reality if it is imagined by enough people, collectively. It is in this way that anti-hauntology has the potential to act as a hyperstitional concept which can actualize a new culture, and create a Whole New World.[12]

Thus, in opposition to Mark Fisher, who decried in 2014 the loss of a future that was ‘no longer white, male, or heterosexual’,[13] we are presented with trans artists, queer artists, and artists from all corners of the globe creating and transforming the very concept of what our future could look like outside of the Western-centric, patriarchal world order. From the Seeds of the Future[14] sown by the experimental sounds of Gooooose and 33EMYBW in China, to the rise of K-pop, reggaeton, and afrobeats across the world, the future of popular culture has never looked more diverse.[15]

However, even though looking to Asia, Africa, or Latin America is a step in the right direction, a step away from constraints of hauntology, this kind of cultural diversity is only the start. As Deleuze and Guattari note: ‘art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines.’[16] The art and music discussed here may set the stage for a new future, but it is only one tool of many. The cultural production of diverse localities and their connection to a globalized future is by no means an end in itself.

In fact, the sinofuturism of SVBKVLT artists like Gooooose and 33EMYBW could be seen as a perfect example of an accelerationist music. Neo-China has arrived — and it’s here to stay. Yet, if we want to situate these artists within anti-hauntology — a concept which shares many attributes with accelerationism, but sits firmly outside it[17] — we must turn to cosmotechnics as a philosophy that takes the specificities of globalism and localism seriously and shows how to move beyond them.

Cosmotechnics and Dis-orient-ation

In The Question Concerning Technology in China, Yuk Hui claims that sinofuturism as it exists in its current form, i.e. as a hypercapitalist/communist hybrid with ‘Chinese characteristics’, is ultimately an acceleration of the European modern project which has taken hold across the world.[18] To conceptualize a new future requires moving beyond this project in such a way that the local takes on a new significance, not merely in the form of a reutilization of indigenous knowledge or vernacular aesthetics, but as inherently tied to, and reflective of, the global. As Hui writes:

[T]oday, the task of overcoming modernity through modernity brings us to the question of specificity and locality. Locality is not the reassuring alternative to globalization, but its “universal product”. If we want to talk about locality again, then we must recognize that it is no longer an isolated locality […] but must be a locality that appropriates the global instead of being simply produced and reproduced by the global. The locality that is able to resist the global axis of time is one capable of confronting it by radically and self-consciously transforming it — rather than merely adding aesthetic value to it.[19]

Overcoming modernity through modernity recognizes the same philosophical imperative that underlies anti-hauntology. Localized aesthetics are not enough to counter the aesthetics of the apocalypse. In order to move beyond modernity as it exists now — trapped in its Backrooms and virtual plazas, haunted by digital ghosts symbolising the end — we must reconceptualize what localization means in relation to globalization.

Indeed, the Backrooms and their liminal counterparts are a perfect example of a Westernized subconscious made real through the digital image; they are a specifically localized dystopia that has become global. The disquieting nature of the Backrooms is a by-product of Western industrial capitalism’s infiltration into the very concept of space. Hell, for the contemporary urbanized consumer in China, Europe, and America, is no longer fire, flames and eternal damnation, but the endless drudgery and disorientation of the office environment.

However, as Hui notes: ‘“Disorientation” does not mean simply that one has lost one’s way and doesn’t know which direction to choose; it also means the incompatibility of temporalities, of histories, of metaphysics: it is rather a “dis-orient-ation.”’[20]

Here, Hui’s play on words works on multiple levels. The first refers to the malaise diagnosed by Stiegler in Technics and Time 2, which places disorientation at the center of his critique of contemporary industrial capitalism.[21] The second highlights the loss of grounding that so-called ‘oriental’ societies have, according to Hui, been going through since the slow embracing of the European modernist project from the nineteenth century onwards.

The drudgery of the Backrooms, this boredom at the end of the world, is no longer limited to the West; it is slowly transmuting itself into a universal concept. We merely need to look at China’s tǎng píng (literally ‘lying flat’) movement, which advocates a simple way of life, rejecting the typical hyper-competitive lifestyle many young Chinese urbanites are forced into, to see this in action. Here, like similar movements that have taken place in other parts of the world, many of the urban youth in China are seeking a form of resistance against the disorientation that arises from the combination of Western industrial capitalism and Chinese collectivist history, which, Hui claims, also implies a loss of metaphysical grounding. So, perhaps tǎng píng can be seen as a short-lived remedy to the dual notion of dis-orient-ation, but it is not a long-term solution. The malaise of the end is ever present.

Here it is useful to remember the words of David Graeber who claimed that ‘the world we inhabit is something we made, collectively, as a society, and therefore, that we could also have made differently.’[22] The point raised by Hui, which also underlies anti-hauntology, resonates strongly with Graeber’s statement. To Hui, different ways of imagining the world — our different thought structures and cosmologies — have an active effect on the technics of the future. This new form of thinking is what Hui calls ‘cosmotechnics’. It emphasizes that our scientific and technical thinking emerges under cosmological conditions that are expressed in the relations between humans and their milieus. These relations are never static. They can always be reimagined.[23]

Therefore, in order to reappropriate modern technology away from the Western industrial model, the first requirement is to reconfigure the fundamental metaphysical grounds that underpin our understanding of technologies in general; the second is to reconstruct a new episteme upon this ground which will serve as the condition for technical invention, development, and innovation, in such a way that these innovations will no longer be mere imitations or repetitions of Western industrial technologies.[24] This cosmotechnical approach to the creation of a new future would allow contemporary societies across the world to re-orient themselves not only temporally (in relation to the past and the future) but spatially and technologically (in relation to their cosmological milieu). It is the first step in overcoming modernity and moving past the techno-logic of the end.

So, where do we go from here? With anti-hauntology breaking down the temporal specificities of cultural production, and cosmotechnics re-imagining the local and the global, what future can we now imagine? What new language will be made with the semiotics of the end? The future is ours to make. This afterword has sought to take on board the lessons of Deleuze and Guattari and ‘start at the end’, but of course, this is only one small step (for man) in the right direction, it is up to us collectively to decide where to take the giant leap (for mankind). To conclude, I will leave my readers with another quote from Yuk Hui; a philosopher who understands this all too well. As he writes at the end of his book:

One will certainly have to understand science and technology in order to be able to transform them, but after more than a century of “modernisation”, now is the moment to seek a new form of practice, not only in China but also in other cultures. For China addressed in this book is only one example, and only one of many possibilities. This is where imagination should take off and concentrate its efforts.[25]

Let us use our imagination to concentrate our efforts away from the logic of despair, towards the logic of hope. Only then can we rewrite the future after the end.

Coda

In the post-internet world, a multitude of technical realities are brought into existence  through the imagination of cosmotechnical futures.

The Western industrial world order is no longer an approximation of the end.

National borders still exist, yet the individual and the collective are no longer spatially constrained.

Long circuits of individuation shoot off in infinite directions across state lines.

Eastern anti-hauntology breaks through the great (fire)wall of China.

AI designed vernacularism.

Solarpunk imaginaries.

Cyberspace merges into meatspace.

The culture of the future is both localized and truly global.

All aboard the Trans-Aeon Express.

The revolution will be digitized.

References

33EMYBW. ‘Seeds of the Future’, track 6, on Arthropods (Shangai: SVBKVLT), 2019, 10 files.

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. And: Phenomenology of the End. Cognition and Sensibility in the Transition from Conjunctive to Connective Mode of Social Communication, Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books, 2014.

Bluemink, Matt. ‘Anti-Hauntology: SOPHIE, Stiegler, and the Ruins of Accelerationism’, Blue Labyrinths, 9 February 2021, https://bluelabyrinths.com/2021/02/09/anti-hauntology-stiegler-and-the-ruins-of-accelerationism/.

_____. ‘Anti-Hauntology: Dancing With Ghosts and Education’, Blue Labyrinths, 13 February 2021, https://bluelabyrinths.com/2021/02/13/anti-hauntology-dancing-with-ghosts/.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Bloomsbury, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, London: Zer0 Books, 2014.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It, London: Penguin, 2019.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016.

Land, Nick. ‘Hyperstition: An Introduction’, Orphan Drift, 2009, https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/.

_____. ‘Meltdown’, in Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (eds) Fanged Noumena. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012 (1994), 441–460.

SOPHIE. ‘Whole New World / Pretend World’, track 9, on Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (Sydney: Future Classic, London: Transgressive Records), 2018, LP.

Stiegler, Benard. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

_____. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, trans. Daniel Ross, Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

Stiegler, Benard and Rogoff, Irit. ‘Transindividuation’, e-flux 14 (March 2010), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/14/61314/transindividuation/.

The Ister (dir. David Barison and Daniel Ross, 2004). David Barison and Daniel Ross.