Wait! Before you close the server I have one last post. We have realised something rather important that simply must be included and that is that we have finally hit upon the right metaphor for the times and fittingly it is an illusion. At the end of last season we likened the post truth era to the 'infinite jest', to an addictive spectacle that one cannot look away from and while that holds it is not enough. We arrived at 'nothing' as a suitable metaphor a few works past, as the tanks rolled in, and that is not enough. The invasion is for us the result of the 'infinite jest', a result of the past six years of addictive distraction, that sustained effort to "fill the zone with shit",1 after which there is 'nothing' left to moor us and we cannot know where it might lead. (I believe there is talk of Sweden joining the NATO group?) We thought of 'nothing' as our metaphor precisely because, with the crumbling architecture of societal imaginary well past repair, anything seems possible. Admittedly we were in a sensitive state but there you go. Our 'Still Life With Nothing' stands and at least can represent a point of discussion but as metaphor for the times more broadly, for the new dark age ushered in not by Little Vladz and Don Donalad but through AI, it doesn't fit the bill. 

What has got us hot and bothered enough to swim after the ship like this is one of my daughters optical illusion cards that I chanced upon under a book (not Infinite Jest) when tidying up. It is a simple line drawing of an impossible shape. It is impossible because it does not work in space; it makes no sense but there it is right in front of you. The bottom of the drawing shows three tubes like a fork but the top of the drawing shows only two prongs. It is called the impossible trident I believe. In the middle somehow the illusion sits but it hard to see it clearly, it cannot be grasped at once, or rather the only thing that is grasped at once is its impossibility. We are left in a state of sustained searching for a resolution that is suggested but will never come. Its a like a picture of a lie. That is how it feels today and that is how it will feel tomorrow(s) also, we are convinced. It was not until we drew it out a few times to replicate the illusion that we decided on a final picture and it seemed only right to make a couple to contrast our 'nothing' with the 'impossible something'. So there you have it, put a fork in us.

We can say finally that we understand that a state of disorientation, confusion and uncertainty is normal now, its how power works you could say and on that basis perhaps it will become less disorientating. But on the other hand if we have indeed entered a 'new dark age' in which the complexities of the AI automation process become completely beyond human comprehension then disorientation shall grow and grow until such time as we have the shamans forecast after the sports and weather! An existence impossible to comprehend yes, but let us wade in a little further and ask whether our illusion metaphor speaks to a scenario where the very possibility to orientate to society becomes impossible. Obviously humans have never at any stage comprehended 'everything' but various fictions and narratives about the world have prevailed in different societies throughout history and held sway. These social imaginaries keep it all together essentially (we wade in still further) and it is that function which is denied us in contemporaneity. We can no longer have our imaginary cake and eat it. No settled, total idea of common plight can function as it has done in the past and this for many reasons but certainly because all imaginaries, whether religious, political, monarchical or scientific even, are trumped by AI. So saying our impossible object metaphor refers to an AI imaginary.

The way to face that impossibility is via an engagement with 'contemporaneity'. No doubt our late burst of reading, particularly Osbourne and Ranciere also has infected us but we have always been going that way. Indeed we wrote in our previous post about an impossible situation of keeping the feet on the ground while our pieces (of our imaginary) are in the air and while that state fits our impossible illusion metaphor we must now take this late chance to concede the contradiction we have arrived at. We say we search for orientation in the post truth era but having thought and worked over these three long hard seasons we now posit that orientating to the times actually involves a refusal precisely to arrive at a settled state of identity formed orientation, lest we be Borg food for the populist. Thanks but no thanks. Rather, our creative way is now based on thinking, living and working the contradictions of contemporaneity. In recognizing the increasingly disorientating trajectory set for us by the powers that be and engaging with it and even sustaining a willfully disorientated state in refusal to be framed too tightly, too simplistically, too predictably, too computationally. Look here, this is all improvisation and that is resistance! Let us get comfortable with this fragmented state and use it perversely as a means to orientate with some self determination. Like a hedgehog.2

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As before,

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John

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1. Alt right media mogul Steve Bannon: “The Democrats don’t matter, the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Mentioned also in Work 15, see note 8.

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2. The significance of a hedgehog is unknown.

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