An Unearthly Politics A: History as an Unconscious Object

(Modified version of Self-Portrait with Cupid and Death by Hans Thoma)

“Cosmology and altered states of consciousness act as a sheltering sky that shields us from the boundlessness of space, its empirical content as ultimately insubstantial as that merciful optical illusion, the thin stratum of blue that lies between us and the black infinity that surrounds our planet.” — Roger Griffin (Shattering Crystals: The Role of ‘Dream Time’ in Extreme Right-Wing Political Violence) [emphasis added]

0. Outerlines

The objectives of this piece will be to 1) give a basic overview of temporal history; 2) explore the human experience through the binomial spectrum of Chronos and Kairos; 3) speculate on developments in chrono-ethology (the study of human behavior in relation to time) concerning space travel; and 4) put forward a utopian solution to the Azathothian crisis. The progression of this piece will be separated into alphabetized installments. Part A will explore a summary of (mostly) human history, which will be Chronos dominant in exploration and layout. Part B will explore the kairological side of history through episodic events and temporal-ideological dilation. Part C will explore two hypothetical temporal ages in correspondence to humanity’s adjustment to a spacefaring future, one of which is not the utopian solution to the Azathothian crisis while the other will be put forward as the solution. Parts D and E do not exist. Part F will comprise non-linear (from c-linear perspective) interruptions in the text that will provide extra details, summaries, or explanations.

F-I. Note on outerlines

Positioning the “outerlines” within A is because it in itself is chronological and implies an infinite series of equally meaningless empty, as A, B, and C are an equal sequence of linear progression that unfolds in the implications of D, E, and F. However, F-I has followed from A-0, and what will come after this will not be F-II and an infinite sequence of negative numbers, but instead the nonsensical will follow, the nonsensical of A-I. Part F will serve as a series of fragmented and intrusive notes within A, B, and C. This is because Part F has decided to follow its own very specific recombined k-linear path of development that constantly interrupts the c-linear paths of the others to add additional information. Which may produce an overall disjointed feeling of textual breakups and suspension in the reader.

I. Cosmic-unconscious, objectified history

Unconscious history is, in its initial phase inside a completely pre-sensory universe, an untold unraveling of unconscious forces that collide and separate spectacularly. Billions of years of horror and beauty go on unspoken but never silent, just unheard. Enter the earliest traces of life — the beginnings of awareness, of sight, smelling, and hearing, of touch, pain, and pleasure. Single-celled things become multi-celled, and so on. Life begins with the inception of prehuman sensory history. This transformation of a non-sensory universe into a sensory one is the beginning of understanding unconscious history’s dominance. Great beasts teach their young how to hunt and how not to be hunted. Their dead bodies then provide for the rest of life on earth. Predation runs off the sensory logic of running, hiding, and fighting — a great war between sensory entities fighting with and against each other, both the prey and predator attempting to resist the larger unconscious forces that have established this landscape of beings who wish to go on, to live forever, but are always denied further potential within their generations as death reaps, swiping its blade blindly and unfeeling. The predator and prey are in an unwinnable war, forced into these battle roles, forming battle lines, and taking up arms in the forms of their antlers, spikes, paws, etc. that have been passed on through adaptations. As if having children or merely caring for them were part of a grander attempt at hope for a future in which the youth could win the unwinnable war. Somewhere along these intermixing and separating lines of earth evolution come the hominids, and unconscious history’s domain is further undermined as human consciousness proliferates.

The reason why humans can undermine unconscious history is because in contrast to non-human sensory history being defined by complete instinct, leaving the non-human animal to be confined to his world forever, i.e., the wolf stuck in the confines of his wolf world and the rabbit stuck in his, human sensory history is defined by the instinct of incompleteness, and so the human world is unconfinable. The rabbit is a “complete animal” and so has far less time or ability to ponder his existence, while the human, as an “incomplete animal,” will conjure up cosmology to try and fulfill themselves. Rabbit ecology is a cage of terrorizing limits, while human ecology is potentially unlimited and able to create an unterrorizable world. However, as human history begins, so does the continuation of objectified history (of which those cosmic unconscious forces continue), and as humans develop their self-consciousness, they also, at some point, develop hierarchical systems, of which the former will comprise our next phase of objectified history as species-conscious, objectified history.

II. Species-conscious, objectified history

The story of human history, as constantly retold from myth to truth, from re-myth to re-truth, phasing into the real and retrospect, is its subjectivity in development with a deepening, expanding, and penetrating self-reflection. Cognition, then, is driven by its own self-understanding, a long process of reflexivity that results in cosmological growth that continues to expand. This expansion of cosmology must face two constant conflicts. The first is the conflict of otherness; the “other,” who is, from their own perspective, a subject, is also expanding outward and inward. These two subjects (and others) reach from themselves in the recognition of each other’s consciousness. If the subject doesn’t destroy all sources of otherness and learns to harness a form of extreme kindness, it could unlock an acceleration of developing subjectivity. The second is the conflict of Chronos, time that is meaningless, and more disturbingly, the permanent interruption of conscious development that results from death. However, humanity’s struggle with death is partial; it struggles to avoid a death that is devoid of meaning rather than completely avoiding death. The concession of the nihilistic abyss is a “conscious death,” as the subject cannot regrow wings after Chronos has clipped them. In this way, death has two faces, one you can see when imbued with higher meanings and fighting for a warrior’s cause, the other you cannot see but always surrounds you.

First conflict is one of the conflicts of consciousness facing another and how to deal with this other’s consciousness, particularly when they become self-aware of each other. Multiple consciousnesses think of themselves in unity, as a group with shared interests that transform into shared values and, finally, a shared world. The individual can now extend Kairos against Chronos with group activities of shared ritual and comradery. Now the first conflict develops from antagonism between individuals to antagonism between groups. At a certain point, groups accumulate around the shared direct community of tribes, where every member knew each other directly, which in turn accumulates into an imagined community, where every member had to imagine themselves in community with people they would never directly meet, which in cyclical time would be religious communities imagined as shared through script languages and dynastic realms imagined as shared through dynasty.

Second conflict runs through the first and vice versa, it is the conflict between Chronos and Kairos. Chronos has many names, profane time, nude time, neglected time, in-vain time, etc., it refers to those moments in life in which the cosmological forces are unshielded as meaning-making breaks down and you experience the futility of living in an absurd cosmos of purposeless existence. Kairos also known as sacred time, armored time, quality time, con-vain time, etc., refers to those moments in life in which the cosmological forces are shielded by meaning-making and you experience the filling of a proposed existence. Kairos suspends the effects of Chronos and vice-versa. Lastly, within second conflict, we have a third temporal-experience, Aionios and its many names of transcendental time, eternal time, God’s time, heavenly time, and etc., which means a new order of time that sublates the moments of Kairos. Basically, a vast spatio-temporality where you experience a continuous and permanent meaningfulness that is unimpeded by Chronos. In order to experience this time generally requires one to undergo a “warrior’s cause” to fight and finally destroy all forces deemed chronological, that which makes time unspecial, and degenerate, those that enforce unspecial time.

First and second conflicts don’t refer to one always literally following the other or some succession of historical events; humans experience a crisis of meaning and otherness at roughly the same time. Otherness makes your meaningful world feel insecure, and this can lead to your sense of meaning coming under threat and possibly being undone by others. Thus, the Other is seen as a potential threat to Kairos. On the other side of this, Chronos can make you feel alienated from others, producing otherness in turn.

A simplified outline of the first conflict’s evolution runs as follows: Individuals overcome themselves (an internal battle of the self and other) to become a singular subject, and this subject then confronts the other, either by destroying them or rethinking them as both sharing the same world of meaning; this continues until you get tribes, and so on. This evolution doesn’t imply that the conflict of the self or an immediate other ends, but that these intimate battles are recontextualized in greater and greater degrees of intimacy as humanity expands within itself.

The simplified outline of the second conflict can be explained through the concept of mazeway resynthesis. Mazeway means cognitive mapping, where you take the external world and then build it within your own internal view by generalizing that external data into concepts, ideas, beliefs, etc. and resynthesis is when you take this internal data and reshape it to then form a system of belief you then use to influence the external world. Then new external information is interpreted through this belief system, and it’s either expanded, reinforced, or torn down, and a new system of belief takes its place. Which of the three happens is a matter of a seemingly infinite variety of personal and environmental factors. You create meaning to deal with the meaninglessness around you, and when this meaninglessness strikes through, you respond with new meaningfulness, and so on.

To conclude our section on species-conscious, objectified history we will explore the triad of earth-historical limits, the stage conditions for the human story of self-consciousness. From humanity’s emergence as homo-sapiens hundreds of thousands of years ago to now, the space of this species’ story has been Earth, or Terra. This space is filled with actors whose bodies hold a specific and generalized imagination of integrity, or corpus. The evolution of Terra and corpus deeply depends on the sun, or sol. The rise and fall of the sol created the first sense of time as cyclical; the further experience of days gave way to seasons and then years, all of which reinforced this cyclical view of time. It’s an understandable but premature mistake to argue that human history is the history of Terra, corpus, and sol, and that humans are then the subjects of the earth, the subjects of their bodies, and the subjects of their sun. However, this is a form of imaginative subjugation, a consciousness stagnation that lends itself to an obsession with equilibrium and harmony falsely applied to nature’s constant betrayal of itself through adaptation.

Adaptation is inter-natural as it moves the natural world from existing nature to new nature, irrespective of whether it leads to ecological prosperity or collapse, for this process is deprived of self-consciousness. If adaptation were made participatory, outside of simply mating options, for example, then this would transform the process itself into a self-consciousness nature. Where the passage of equilibrium-disequilibrium-reequilibrium would move through the self-actualizations of agents rather than as a consequence of intergenerational activities. But the imaginative subjugation responds to the notion of self-conscious nature as a falsity of “unnatural horrors,” and this is “true” to those who say human essence is only Terra, corpus, and sol. However, if humans, by their own essence, can be made more than the history of Terra, corpus, and sol, then the possibility of self-conscious nature presents itself to us. The human subject, by its essence, must then be more than this role as bystander to unconscious natural processes, to move beyond mere observational consciousness and movement and act to make the natural processes themselves aware, or if it cannot be capable of such a feat, then it will fail to be anything more than a victim of history, be it linear or cyclical.

F-II. Note on temporal taxonomy

Temporal experiences will be differentiated from temporal epochs, periods of human history in which the cognitive experience of time (Chronos, Kairos, and Aionios) is overarchingly positioned within and through, as determined by the surrounding world. The first temporal epoch is cyclical time, and then linear time is the current temporal epoch. This distinction can’t be separated down to an exact year but a broad range of time in which humanity collectively experiences a grand cognitive shift due to several developing conditions that reinforce a change between cyclicality and linearity.

• Linear movement of time is simultaneously-across-time. Example: X moves from one side to the other.
• Cyclical movement of time is simultaneously-along-time. Example: X moves simultaneously from all sides as one.

Linear time marks out three distinct periods that things move across while cyclical time marks these three periods as the same period moving along together. Tripartite-time progression is linear while tripartite-time recurrence is cyclical. Human agency moves across time in a singular fashion, where then political ideology imagines the forces of history as a unidimensional agency (or uniagentic), in modernity while in premodernity human agency moves along time in an omnidimensional fashion (or omni-agentically).

III. Primordial-conscious, objectified history

Within the developments of the two conflicts, arose hierarchical systems of organizing and managing the affairs of societies. We may never know for certain when the first hierarchy, let alone inequality, emerged. From what is understood, hierarchical systems were initially (within hunter-gatherer societies) temporary and based on situational, seasonal, ritualistic, large familial ties, and highly experimental conditions. Given the general lack of territorial restrictions, outside the physical difficulties of traversing rough or inhospitable terrain, coupled with the nomadic lifestyle, there was a freedom to move, one of the three primordial freedoms as outlined in the book The Dawn of Everything, along with the other two, freedom to disobey and the freedom to change social relationships. These primordial freedoms created a highly fluid social world in which cyclical time is always on the move. Social progress, then, is completely unmappable and fundamentally nonlinear. Invocation of hierarchical domination during one season while in another this was washed away, or in other regards, some societies were mostly egalitarian except during religious rituals and festivities in which religiously sanctified members of the community were given the powers to dominate others during those brief moments. It’s very possible that you also had early human societies where brute strength became the decider of who ruled over who, as well as societies without any such dominations, even temporary ones at all. The lack of written record meant a reliance on human memory, an ephemeral and constantly changing series of episodic moments as a source of historical understanding. Those born into written history presume that early human oral historians were obsessed with remembering everything in the past with exact meticulous detail, when such an obsession wasn’t there. These oral historians would often change their retellings depending on the audience they were speaking to, what mood they were in, and so on.

As agriculture and domestication entered societies, hierarchies became standardizable into more permanent and less temporary positions, and societies in general became more and more identified as hierarchical in themselves over very long periods of time. Cyclical time moving from a highly fluid and experimental state of cognitive experience into a more solidified and orthodox experience. However, as mentioned before, the non-progressive movement of social change meant that a society could go from hierarchical to egalitarian, back to hierarchical, and in an infinite variety of ways, it’s just that this fluency of heavy political change became harder to conduct as empires and larger religions formed and gained more and more control. As this is the consequence of the slow dissolution of the primordial freedoms.

For simplicity’s sake, we can roughly divide cyclical time from a liquid premodernity to a solid premodernity. Now, this markation of evolutionary development isn’t a teleological claim, it would’ve been completely possible that liquid premodernity never solidified and humanity spent the rest of its history in that form as it had for most of it. The book; The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow does a good job presenting the complexity and nuances of early humanity, as they explore hierarchical forms along administrative, charismatic, and sovereign lines. Where some societies developed only one of these but not the other two, or developed two of them but not all three, and any number of ways these can form and disappear. But the book is even dismissive of evolutionary or simply periodization’s of history, conflating these things with teleology or lack of nuance. They even doubt the overarching cyclical experience of time for early humans. But dependence on day/night awareness, bound by their circadian rhythm, thirst, hunger habits, and so on, shows us that the human body has in itself very cyclical demands, as reinforced externally by its rotating planet. Early travels by celestial navigation, mapping the stars and other planets from Earth, again, point to the human experience as felt and viewed through constant cycles that were quickly imbued with endless meanings.

We can roughly view the slow end of liquid premodernity from around agricultural development to the 5th century AD. By the time the world is filled with great empires and the world-spanning monotheistic Abrahamic religions, the three truths of antiquity provide us with the stamps of solid premodernity:

• I) Script language offered access to privilege ontological truth.

For example, Latin was seen as a sacred language, and so biblical texts were written in it; only those with church authority could then read from the texts, interpret them, and then disseminate the contents to others. This reinforced the idea that knowledge about cosmology was only accessible through certain hierarchical institutions.

• II) Society is naturally organized under high centers.

The establishment of vertical sovereignty, where a sovereign, such as a king, had final authority and so political authority rested from top to bottom, where those below the sovereign were then subjects to his authority. This amounted to a privileging of city centers, interfamilial politics, and roughly marked but undefined borders of dynastic realms. Conscious experience of political authority is seen as a series of vertical lines that start from the supernatural skies to emperors to then everyone else.

• III) Cosmology and history are inseparable, the origins of the earth and humanity are identical.

The oldest of the three truths that existed throughout liquid premodernity as well, but here in solid premodernity, the inseparability of the universe’s start and humanity’s takes on a highly formalized, centralized, and institutionalized character when coupled with the other two emerging truths of script languages and high centers. One of the major traits of premodernity is the hegemonic character of this inseparability, and the formalization of centripetal political institutions transformed it in solid premodernity into a powerful force for the “warriors of god” to hold onto. You didn’t fight for history or the universe; instead, the universe and history fought through you. Premodern warfare is a conflict of the possessed, while modern warfare is a conflict of the dispossessed.

On the other end of this highly complex historical topic, for which exact knowledge is difficult, modern philosophers made generalizing statements about the “state of nature,” as Graeber and Wengrow pointed out. Saying either it was completely violent (a Hobbesian state of nature) or completely peaceful (a Rousseauian state of nature). While these states of nature are not chronological fact, recent archeological evidence holds no water for these idealizations, these states of nature still hold kairological importance as their ideological purpose serves to use these fictional pasts as a means to extract values and ideals from, not to return to them exactly, but to retain with them in an ideological eternality, values that reflect a simultaneity-across-time. Where in Rousseau’s future the virtuous state of nature could meet the virtuous commonwealth of the future or, in Hobbes’s future where we’ve learned to avoid the violent state of nature and create a future of virtuous commonwealth, where the eternality of the human spirit is continued but the past violence isn’t, similar to how Rousseau’s virtuous future continues the past peace but not it’s ignorance.

IV. Suprahuman-conscious, objectified history

The premodern world was dominated by the cyclicality of full, heterogeneous time, as cause and effect were a series of recurrences lavishly compartmentalized into sacred meaning, prefigurative rituals of fulfillment, and metahistorical and suprahuman interventions. The heterogenous aspect comes from the pre-globalized fragmentation in which humanity was separated into these realms of cyclical canopies, imagining themselves as part of expansive and sanctified religious and dynastic communities. This age saw the proliferation and dominance of religious suprahuman transcendental properties and entities. These “above human” forces were themselves imagined as conscious and the rulers of historical development, as they could interfere with and violate human agencies as determined by their whims and rules. Humans were the victims of history as dictated by the “above humans,” and for a while, this was inescapable.

We will separate premodern religions by direct shamanism exhibited during liquid premodernity and the imagined scripturalism that formed during the development of the written word and became a dominant part of solid premodernity. Direct shamanism refers to early tribal religions that formed as the result of a shaman leadership that convinced other members of their group that through rituals that induced spiritual experiences they had gotten in contact with the spirit realm and were thus in a position to explain how the world worked on the spiritual level to the rest. While imagined scripturalism refers to a religion that uses a written doctrine to draw spiritual wisdom and replenishment from where-in other anonymous religious members are imagined as existing simultaneously with them in sacred commitment and community. This forms with the accumulation of interconnecting groups and written languages where people could imagine themselves as part of a religion with members outside of their immediate community.

Historical victimhood within cyclicality can be drawn out as the calculation of superthings overriding man: first, the superthings were unconscious, tornadoes and rock slides crushing humans without feeling or intentional purpose; second, the superthings were conscious; the Lord sent those tornadoes and rock slides as a test. Instinctive naturalists, the chronological atheists of metaphysics, will recount this calculation as first natural catastrophes and as second, unnatural abstractions. It is true that this victimhood caused by the “above humans’’ was actually dealt with by other humans. Chronologically, we can say that Job was never tested by God, but rather that he imagined his episodes of tragedy as meaningful when, in reality, they were meaningless. This temptation sounds perfectly “real,” but it is static. This observation pretends to be an unconscious statement of fact when it is an attempt by conscious minds to imagine these events as if they were unconscious observers. Reflective naturalists, the kairological atheists of metaphysics, will re-recount this calculation as both examples of natural catastrophes, as the terrors of an unpurposed rockslide and a suprahuman purposed rockslide in its destruction of conscious development. Religion, then, is a horror, but not because it makes “unnatural meaningless claims,” but rather because its natural meaningful claims produce an alienation of any subjectivity that tries to escape its historical victimization.

The formation of religious systems is an outgrowth of the imaginative, magical, and pattern-seeking thinking of human consciousness. Using abstract thinking to generalize the world around them into a mazeway of understandings, values, ideals, and beliefs. Pulling from this mazeway to extract and then synthesize for the creation of new ideas and systems of thought. This simple world-building capability that happens within human minds at some point transforms into outer-world building, the start of the supernatural. As humans came to exist inside bubbles of sacred thought, which would come under threat by liminal forces outgrown by differing factors, leading to the creation of new bubbles to hold over the ever-blackening skies of infinity. The move from one bubble of meaning into another required one to enter liminality, the between-time where exposure to the absurdity of a meaningless universe penetrates the psyche deep. Even within bubbles, this exposure to Chronos, an uncovered time where you’re laid bare against the black infinity, would occur during ritual processes. A child entering into a ritual to become an adult meant heading through disorientation and nothingness head-on. While you’re inside the ritual, inside the threshold of processes, you are neither child nor adult but rather nothing.

Suprahuman history is a side effect of humanity reimagining unconscious historical forces as not only conscious and filled with independent will but also highly emotional. Pantheons of gods engaged in love affairs and wacky hijinks as a result of anthropomorphizing the universe. Animism isn’t an escape from this process, as all objects are given spiritual and animated energies. This too is humanity projecting its ability to will itself onto the rest of the world, irrespective of whether a rock stood motionless or not. This projection of consciousness onto the unconscious is itself complex and not inherently a religious or even hierarchical pursuit.

F-III. Note on secularism

While Chronos has always invoked an infinity of oblivion, an epiphany of empty simultaneity, this could be retreated from by the fact that Kairos within cyclical time was largely conceived through the idea that religious cosmology and human history were indistinguishable. In linear time, religious cosmology and history were divorced but then reinterpreted back together into a second marriage of secular cosmology. As is the consequence of the secularization of the world, religion re-examines itself within this historical-cosmological divorce, but in that re-examination, it doesn’t destroy itself; it develops within itself. Secularism, in a very general formula, acts to create distance and space between direct religious intervention into sciences, government, etc., as to allow for other religions to coexist, but this pluralism is not official but unofficial as to provide any religion (in theory) a place to occupy these distances so long as they then provide those spaces and distances in turn. It’s no wonder then that religion itself played a role in developing secularism as a means to destroy invasive religion but retain noninvasive religion. Secular ethics is non-religious but not inherently devoid of religion in itself. These noninvasive religions are those accepting of social repositioning and subordination to secular agencies. However, invasive religions view secularization as a historical terror because of this subordination. Likewise, secular forces view invasive religions as the historical terror attempting to subordinate them under their whims.

V. Empty-conscious, objectified history

Full, heterogeneous time, as a result of the transition from the 15th to the 18th centuries, was “emptied out” into the linearity of empty, homogeneous time. The speculation we can finally start to mention is that a full-fledged space age of human expansion from earth would lead to an exploration event — an exploration of the human body and conscious mind. Similar but drastically different from the earlier travels in the time between the cyclical and linear, when Europeans explored the seas and “discovered’’ other peoples, which forced their own existence into a greater perspective. While early humans did travel between continents, they were still ruled by day and night cycles and small group organizations due to a lack of technical capabilities. Humans could travel the globe (or however far their feet could take them) during this early age, but they were not yet globally conscious until these later ages, when humanity would attain a global, truly earth-wide awareness in its interactions with people from around the world. This opening of perspective in reference to deeper and wider scales of possibility and knowing could lead to a shift in the temporal experience of political imagination from the current empty, homogeneous time to an age where this linear temporality transitions into a conscious temporality, a free, xenogeneous time in the human voyage to outer space. A politics that can transcend even the boundaries of general relativity.

An aspect of linear time is that motion is conceived through one spatial dimension, the progression of history is viewed from a classical mechanics standpoint, a Newtonian view of temporality. Linear time demands one dimensionality of uniformly meaningless events which traverse the world, however, this doesn’t mean that modernization is singular. Every country, society, and culture adds variation to the ways in which a space is made modern, presenting us with a varied vision of how to implement empty simultaneity. For example, Saudi Arabia houses within itself modernization alongside its own official interpretation of Islamic values. Meaning that capitalism exists next to a religion whose origins were very cyclical, as all the Abrahamic religions were. Muslims (as well as Christians, Jews, and non-Abrahamic religious people) have had to traverse the transition from a filled time to a now emptied one. Even though capitalism demands linear singular dimensionality that hasn’t stopped a wide variety of responses and means to cope with its alienation from permeating all over the globe such as the use of Islamic faith to try and survive the ever emptying of meaning which surrounds Muslims and everyone else. Modernity is singular and multi-singular (linear and multilinear) in its ability to invoke alternating responses to itself as well as the many ways in which it will assimilate those responses into itself. How an individual Muslim is made modern is both the same and different from how a Christian is made modern. The idea that modernity is inherently “Christian” or “western” is a mistake, while the European world opened the box of linearity, presumably, if any other region of the world had modernized before them, they too would’ve unleashed the terrors of emptiness.

There is an upper-case Modernity (an existing modernity) which functions as the dominant form of the temporality of the new, which has attained hegemony over the project of modernization. From roughly the early 18th to mid-19th centuries, the war for who would be the face of modernity ended with liberalism’s victory over, first, modernizing dynastic empires, and second, illiberal forms of conservatism that arose to try and take up the project of modernizing illiberal sources of power such as monarchical and clerical structures for throwing off liberal influences. Liberalism isn’t modernity, but it has become its human resources face for a while now that both have become synonymous, particularly as used in pejorative speech by those seeking a new hegemonic temporality of the new, either systemically or anti-systemically, to replace liberalism’s domination.

F-IV. Note on temporal reflection

Cyclical Chronos (C-Cyclical) means cyclical Kairos (K-Cyclical), and linear Chronos (C-Linear) means linear Kairos (K-Linear). Premodernity and premodernism reinforce each other, just as modernity and modernism do. While midmodernity, the transitional period between the premodern’s shift into the modern, and midmodernism, the response within the between, destroyed each other, resulting in the very production of the modern to take place. Emptiness moves along time in cyclicality, and so fulfillment then must move along time. Emptiness moves across time in linearity, and so fulfillment then must move across time. Premodern Kairos must invent a new cyclicality filled with meaningful moments to offset chronological cyclicality. Modern Kairos must invent a new linearity filled with meaningful moments to offset the chronological linearity. Both forms of Chronos are cumbersome and empty; however, linear time is far more extreme in its ability to overwhelm people and in producing greater reflexivity in them. Cyclical Chronos could, in theory, be easier to offset and hold off, as heterogenous time produced a kind of “stability” in its ability to offer greater homogeneity of meaning since sacred canopies were less threatened in certain ways than they are now. Which, in comparison to linear time, produces a greater heterogeneity of meaning. An interesting paradox presents itself to us, cyclical time is heterogenous in scale but homogenous in center, while linear time is homogenous in scale but heterogenous in its center, producing a decentering effect due to the planet-wide scale of emptiness achieved through modern globalization.

Chronological linearity doesn’t distinguish which linear moments are important or not and instead treats all these moments as simultaneously empty, while kairological linearity synthesizes all the meaningful moments to blast away the chronological continuum for a new continuum of meaning. This interpretation that Chronos and Kairos act differently within cyclical and linear time differs from those who interpret Kairos as only cyclical and Chronos as only linear. Since kairological linearity is picking out a meaningful past, present, and future for whatever essence is deemed important for renewal and reconnection, this redeemed future completes the past, offering an illusion of a “cycle”; however, this “cycle” is actually flattened out into an alternating straightened line as eternality is invoked across the gulfs of time that continuously lay themselves out.

Simplified step-by-step representation of Kairos’s extraction of Chronos in order for Kairos to shield themselves from Chronos’s production of emptiness.

1. Chronological cycle and linearity.

2. Identifying key moments within chronology.

3. Separating those moments from chronology.

4. Refilling the connections between the key events with meaning.

5. Kairological cycle and linearity.

6. Kairological shielding over/within Chronology.

This means that Kairos is pulling and taking moments throughout a meaningless history, a chronology, and then re-sequencing them into its own history of meaning, a kairology. The red dots represent those specific events you’re taking out of Chronos to re-sequence into a Kairos. The gray circle and line represent those kairologies as fully formed into a new meaningful history. You then take this kairology and pull it over chronology in order to then shield yourself from chronological emptiness. The visual above then only serves to explain and present mazeway formation, but it doesn’t show us mazeway disintegration.

VI. Newtonianism in the physics of ideology

The four major genera of political ideology in modernity — liberalism (homogenizing territorial contracts), conservatism (syngenizing territorial conservations), socialism (autogenizing territorial ownerships), and fascism (palingenizing territorial ultranations) — are all running on conceptions of Newtonian physics, which is all (seemingly) unable to survive the voyage of humanity leaving spaceship Earth for spaceship eternity.

To unpack this further for clarity, “homogenizing territorial contracts” refers to liberalism’s demands of a geo-mapped globe of social contracts to secure the fulfillments of “natural rights,” a world of territorially contracted bodies. While “syngenizing territorial conservations” means conservatism demands a world of territorial conservatories that accumulate hierarchies to defend developing social inheritances. Socialism’s “autogenizing territorial ownerships” refers to its demand of attaining self-direction through ascending the means of production beyond divisions of divided hands into the realm of the social for all to freely associate with. For the vertical socialists, this is achieved through accumulating territorial states to then run across a map, while for the horizontal socialists, this map-running seems absurd. A socialist who understands map-burning as a precondition for a free world is truly alien to everyone else. Lastly, fascism’s “palingenizing territorial ultranations” means a demand for a world of territorially reborn national essences. Either through globe-spanning conquest or globe-spanning segregation, which always demands threatening the interstate system and undermining the concept of the nation-state itself. We should separate “nation birthing” from “nation rebirthing” here. It’s all the world’s difference to know why “Risorgimento” (Rising again) is vastly different from Mussolini’s “Third Rome,” as Italian unification sought meaning in becoming an independent part in a multi-dependent system, while Mussolini’s ultimate goal was to free the “Italian essence” from all dependences. Liberalism, conservatism, and socialism can “birth nations,” but fascism turns nationhood itself into an essence of anti-systemic revolution in form and goal. While socialism can use national form, the goal is always nationless. All (except horizontal socialism) view the world through a flat map, but out amongst the stars, these flat maps quickly become curved and shredded. The ideologies will be explored further in Part B. These territorial terms, such as “homogenizing territorial contracts,” aren’t definitions for these ideologies in generic form; instead, they serve as terms for how these ideologies perceive themselves through manifesting in geographic space.

Capitalism, too, is unable to survive because capital runs on (and through) linear time, which is chronologically expressed in calendrical dates/events and compressing Vitruvian (anatomical) structures that inform new hierarchies. This compression of corpus is due to linear times conflict with the cyclical time of the circadian rhythm that beats within humanity. If humanity ever leaves earth (beyond a limited manned mission) and attains a truly post-earth existence, its political imagination would rip itself apart a trillion times more than it did when linear time tore through cyclical time. This obliteration of human imagination, experience, and belongingness is an Azathothian crisis, caused by humanity’s exposure to primordial chaos. Before this a similar crisis happened to humanity all the time but when it happened you only lost your perceptual footing, you never literally lost the Earth beneath you. The linear-cyclical time shift retained a few certainties, three of these are body, sol, and Terra. Body, human anatomy stayed consistent, two legs, two arms, and five fingers remained the average conception of the human form. Sol, the sun rising and falling stayed consistent, even if advancements in artificial lighting have disrupted the cycles of circadian rhythm, your physical being was still bound to the orbit of sol and Terra, humanity remained on Earth and roaming across its geographies. Clearly, the knowledge of these three expanded between cyclical and linear time. Heliocentrism reconceptualized sol significantly for example, humans were no longer the center of the universe, now they were a part of the periphery. This expanded and now humanity is on one of many trillion-trillion peripheries. This understanding itself does lead to existential crisis from feeling “small and insignificant” but this is only a fragment of a taste of what could come.

On Earth, the closest humanity has to experiencing the primordial chaos of vast emptiness and formlessness is in the depths of the ocean. A connection can be drawn between the lost diver and the lost astronaut; both are staring down a depth of darkness that they cannot penetrate and can only be penetrated by. However, this connection wears thin. The ocean floors can be charted, its sea life categorized, and all of this is bound to the earth. Human bodies are violated by these depths when exposed to them without protection, but not in unearthly ways. If you die in the depths, you’re still on the earth and consumed by its life (as you would be if buried on land). Every man lost at sea can be certain of this. An astronaut who is lost and outside the earth’s gravity has no such certainty.

The corpus, the body, is idealized by the image of the iconic Vitruvian Man. Architecture must follow from the mappings of the proportionally “ideal” and “standard” human body. Capitalism demands the standardization of human bodies (the corpus must be confined for packaging and labor) that are continuous with linear and uniform time; thus, the human body must be normative, and all other bodies that fit outside of this are to be deemed “outside normativity.” The source of ableism in capitalism is due to this demand. A person with six arms would disrupt the labor activities of those with two arms. Body participation and augmentation under capitalism have to be limited and stagnated to prevent overperformance or differentiated performances that aren’t sanctioned by capitalism’s uniformity. The disabled are removed from lifework and sanctioned to their own “specialized spaces” to prevent these bodily complexities from causing disruptions to capital flow. Tattooing and piercing are adjustable to capitalism so long as the person with these augmented features is able to be subordinate through covering them or making them “unintrusive” to wage labor. The measurements of performances must remain consistent and continuous; those who can augment themselves with super speed and agility will be measured against those without these augmentations in order to not disrupt capital’s time flow. However, cyclical time is not somehow immune from ableism. The pockets of cyclical fulfillment demand that those bodies within them conform to spiritual rituals and godly forces. Demanding that those who lose their limbs be at the mercy of those in their direct vicinity. Space travel would transform the human body in unmanageable ways as would morphological freedom in general.

The standardization of bodies leads us to discuss the standardization of people groups into imaginable communities who see themselves in determination from the breakup of humanity into separable nations. Nationalism demands the separability of humanity, wherein the species is divisible by a series of internal determinations (defined around ethnic, racial, civic, etc., ties) that lead each nation to define itself in different ways from all other nations. Nationalism sprung forth from linear time’s globalization and the limitations of humanity’s ability to truly imagine itself as a universal and freed species. Capitalism freely feeds on these limitations and lines in the sand that make up the interstate system of the world economy. Both ableism and nationalism demand unchanging and confinable bodies attached to the terrestrial ground; however, rivers have no such inclinations. Water is a betrayer of nations; borders are defined by rivers with the intention of a clearly formed line of division; water has no respect for such demands for fixed forms; these rivers, which are supposed to solidify nations, do the opposite and show how easily liquefied such dividing lines can be. Think about how the formlessness of an infinite outer space would not only betray nations but obliterate them in seconds.

What are lines in the sand when the desert doesn’t exist anymore? Is it true, from what is suggested here, that space travel will guarantee humanity to achieve the cognitive shift capable of imagining time in a conscious temporality? A free, xenogeneous time where all agents are made aliens directing their own histories rather than subjects to gods and kings directing them, causing cyclical victimization. Free also from the madness of an ever unfolding, unfeeling, and uncaring directing of the hands of time on the clocks above, causing linear victimization. Such a thing sounds too certain, too complete for a species of incomplete wonderers. We’re going to have to travel back in time, but kairologically, and then after that we can explore the potential for a different time to emerge. If communism doesn’t win out immediately from exposure to space travel, then it’s possible a different time emerges, a curving of our victimizations. Part F whispers but only through intrusions, and yet Part B hasn’t arrived yet.

“Once upon a time, a man from nowhere wanted to get to somewhere; he was overwhelmed at first by all the nowheres — nowhereing him down into down-there’s — which nowhered his wares until he was bare and naked. The Grim Reaper appeared and said to the man, ‘in the abyss you imagine silence but that only exists in the world with sound, in the abyss you imagine yourself in darkness but that only exists in your mind, in the abyss nothing exists, not even silence, not even your mind.’ The man felt distressed, disenchanted, and disorientated. Out from the nowheres-whereing him in the down-theres, where he was naked from his nowhered wares — Cupid appeared. Cupid said to the man, ‘in the abyss it isn’t so bad, so long as while you’re buried in the nothingness you learn how to fly, so long as in the distress you cling to hope, as long as in the disenchantment you reintroduce yourself to wonder, as long as you’re disorientated you rediscover your place. The world out from the nowheres-nowhereing is frightening. Sometimes those somewheres-somewhereing makes you feel cold and bare, like your really not in the somewheres-somewhereing but rather in the nowheres-nowhereing, but when you’re naked, that’s when a new world appears. A better somewheres-somewhereing to help you get out of all the nowheres-nowhereing.’ The woman, never once really a man, no longer feared the nowheres-nowhereing because in the abyss she learned how to fly to the new somewheres-somewhereing in the sky.” — Part F (From a text that can read itself)

To be continued in part B…

A short glossary of a few terms:

• Aionios — New order of time which sublimates the moments of Kairos. Referred to elsewhere: Aevum, Aeval, transcendental time, eternal time, communism, and rooted modernity.
• Chrono-ethology — The study of human behavior in relation to time.
• Chronos — Meaningless time, which suspends Kairos. Referred to elsewhere: Cronus, Physical time, awake time, material time, empty time.
• Cyclical time — Full, heterogeneous time. Temporal experience of premodernity that was paradoxically homogenous in terms of meaningfulness and the ability to reduce the effects of liminality when one transitioned between cosmologies due to a lack of globalization and limited communications technologies. The fragmented state of humanity meant a tight cosmological grip on conscious experience.
• Kairos — Meaningful time, which suspends Chronos. Referred to elsewhere: Metaphysical time, dream time, special time, revelatory time, moments of being, messianic time, god time, epiphanic time.
• Liminal — The transitory experience between Chronos and Kairos which causes a deep exposure to Chronos that ends in either a new kairological experience or nihilism.
• Linear time — Empty, homogeneous time. Temporal experience of modernity that is paradoxically heterogeneous in terms of meaninglessness as the ability to reduce liminality is severely severed when one transitions cosmologies. The globalized state of humanity causes the transfer of information to intensify and produce far greater opportunity and expansion of mazeway resynthesis. The number of counter-movements to any one canopy is a thousandth, whereas in cyclical time the number of counter-movements was far less.
• Mazeway Resynthesis — Cognitive mapping (mazeway) of the external world as internalized into generalized data of concepts, ideas, beliefs, etc., that is recombined (resynthesis) into a new belief system.
• Newtonian physics — Classical mechanics which is bound to linear direction and the earth’s atmospheric and gravitational conditions.
• Triad of earth-historical limits — The limitations on conscious experience as caused by an exclusive and strict solar-terrestrial-anatomical existence.

Citations and further reading:

• Anthony F. C. Wallace — Mazeway Resynthesis: A Biocultural Theory of Religious Inspiration
• Benedict Anderson — Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
• David Graeber and David Wengrow — The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
• Peter L. Berger — The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
• Roger Griffin — Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler
• Roger Griffin — Shattering Crystals: The Role of ‘Dream Time’ in Extreme Right-Wing Political Violence (https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/Griffin+-+Shattering+Crystals.pdf)