Existence is always behind experience, to the extent there is a present, it is already passed and past. As such, intelligent beings develop or discover language and structures that allow for an understanding of the existence they have been thrown into, an existence that on a long enough timeline can be called history. Symbols, myth, and narrative are some of the means which one can utilize to understand this history. At the most ‘foundational’ level, however, what is known as mathematics is the most immediate and compressed form of understanding. Without romantic symbolic ambiguity, mythological leaps, or linguistic miscommunication, mathematics is knowledge condensed to its terminus, beyond which one cannot calculate or figure out.
The history of what it is to know, and there in the history of history, is thought in parallel with the history of mathematics, of condensed understanding. The blossoming of intelligence, the compression of data and method, and the progress of mathematics are one and the same, with the latter begrudgingly requiring notation. As above so below and as within as without, mathematics—as pointed out in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West second chapter, The Meaning of Numbers—has a distinct actualization within each culture, the historical movement of which mirrors the evolutionary phase shifts of mathematics itself with regard its own understanding. That is, as man’s understanding of history adheres to strict notions of progress, so too does elementary arithmetic with its notable linearity adhere to the same structure.
As culture grows, giving birth to meta or macrohistory, so too does mathematics evolve into algebraic groups and cycles, and, as the complexity of the historical situation gives rise to other actors, the quantum, and non-linearity, so does mathematics follow with its topological and algebraic geometrical evolution. As Spengler states with an emancipatory tone:
“The liberation of geometry from the visual, and of algebra from the notion of magnitude, and the union of both, beyond all elementary limitations of drawing and counting, in the great structure of function-theory—this was the grand course of Western number-thought. The constant number of the Classical mathematic was dissolved into the variable. Geometry became analytical and dissolved all concrete forms, replacing the mathematical bodies from which the rigid geometrical values had been obtained, by abstract spatial relations which in the end ceased to have any application at all to sense-present phenomena.” (TDOTW, XVI)
In time, in history, math evolved beyond sense into pure mathematics and pure abstraction. A communicatory apparatus for the ‘money-spirit’ (Spengler’s term) to come. I wish to explore this evolution in greater detail, briefly assessing first the primitive phase of linearity, arithmetic, and progress, moving into the macrohistorical Spenglerian phase of cyclicity, algebra, and organic culture, and finally concluding with the inhuman, Landian near-future of convergence, motivic, and the inhuman Outside.
Before I set forth, however, there is an immediate contradiction within the prior assessment. For in noting that these separate, increasingly more complex stages are successive, I am still adhering to a foundational mathematic primitivism, wherein the stages remain atop a presupposed linearity or arithmetic. I do not see this as a paradox as much as it is constructive. The latter (increasing abstraction) is dependent on the former (arithmetic and geometry), but in time we overcome each implicit cultural ignorance that often viewed the former as the entire. Not progress, not a depth, but a fragmentation, an unfolding.
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Labelling the early years of the human race as its childhood is to mirror progress’ self-same understanding of man’s, both individual and total, position in the cosmos. Where the Western world is concerned, whether it’s teleological religiosity, narratives of overcoming, or all durations conflated with directional-progression, the earliest appreciations of man’s place in the cosmos are of an arithmetical sort. Stages, phases, leaps, tightropes, and journeys each fall prey to the imposition of linearity.
Linear progression or simply ‘progress’ is, in all its forms, emphatically and definitively human. It need not matter whether the telos is mythologically optimistic, such as widespread emancipation, freedom, or happiness, nor if it is commonly pessimistic i.e. totalitarianism, nuclear war, or the apocalypse. For as far as human reason is concerned each of these states abides by the basic arithmetic of progression and thereby is accepted as understood in its simplicity. That is, it need not matter what A, B, and C are in their content, what matters is our acceptance that we progress from one to the other.
The possibility of a telos (and therein the acceptance of progress) is itself projecting an inherently human mode of sensual apprehension onto the cosmos itself. Progress is the dogmatic slumber. In mathematical abstract, the conceptual framework of this childhood is limited to directed numbers, that is positive and negative integers that ‘move’ either backward (negative) or forward (positive), thus implying a line without depth and a history, that is only an aggrandizement of that which has been, and furthermore, a delusional repetition.
It is of no surprise then that the wealth of human movements born from this foundation—Christianity, Marxism, Primitivism, Anarchism, Conservatism, Gnosticism, Techno-optimism, and Singularitarianism—are all cut from the same progressive cloth. We begin, there is a problem, there is a solution, and we are redeemed/emancipated/returned/released. Man’s earliest approximations of what everything means are unsurprisingly straight forward. By and large, it was understood that those who obeyed certain dogmatic cultural formulations ended up in a distinctly human good place, and those who transgressed toward the inverse a distinctly human bad place. We’re born and taught about point B (point A), we live, grow, and act according to C (point B), and we die and go on to an afterlife (point C).
Once the humanly infantile whimsy of childhood has since been found, time and again, eternally dying, the prior abstract line of history transitions—philosophically, historically, and mathematically—into a circle, a loop, a recursion, a cycle. The faux-straight-line of progress becomes an Ouroboros and the process of geometrical complexity begins to unfold.
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The macrohistorical or historiographical understanding of history as a cycle is, technically, found throughout history in varying forms. The ancient Greek Kyklos (‘cycle’) was an interpretation of governmental cyclicity seen in the works of Plato and Polybius (and later Cicero and Machiavelli), the notion of asabiyyah from Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406), is a concept of social solidarity with an emphasis on unity and a group consciousness that is cyclic in nature, and Giambattista Vico’s magnum opus Scienza Nuova (1725) seeks to explain the rise and fall of societies via historical cycles. Yet, where the West is concerned, one man made the foundation of his most well-known text (and his entire oeuvre) a cyclical historiography that understood Cultures to be akin to organic life forms, and as such, as well as vegetable, animal, and homo-sapien, civilizations too grow, decay, and die. I speak of course of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
In The Decline of the West, Spengler theorizes that ‘Cultures’ (Kulturen) are the meaningful units of history, and that such Cultures are, like individual men, biological organisms that move through stages of growth, decay, and eventually death. Thus, to expand upon this notion of Spenglerian Culture, we may state that the singular ‘organs’ of such organisms are that which, in working together, compose an organic, cultural harmony. As such, in the manner in which one’s lungs, heart, kidneys, and brain each need to perform their respective function for the greater whole, so too – in terms Cultures – do law, art, science, and mathematics need to perform on behalf of the greater organism. Such an organism which, as per its biological reality, is deterministically tethered to a mortality of the Cultural-flesh. This is to say that as the foundation of existence for man and Culture is biology, we must attend to the fact of their eventual demise.
It is evidently and unsurprisingly the case that, published in 1918, Spengler’s The Decline of The West is an emphatically anthropocentric book. Though there is much overturning within the work, inclusive of notions of cyclicity (against linearity), evolution (against reasoned development), and anti-Eurocentrism, there is equally an overlooked repetitive minutiae of self-referentiality when it comes to the aforementioned units of history that are ‘Cultures’. Individual (high) cultures – Babylonian, Chinese, Classical, Western, etc. – as composed of individuals, leaders, heroes, ‘Caesars’, groups, parties, movements, peoples, classes, etc, actively sublimate their varying culturally evolved customs and myths into the undiffused state of organism. A negentropic Culturo-evolutionary process of growth/becoming, which thus creatively stagnates into the becoming of Civilization, and therein, eventually dissipates as that which was once sublimated lacks the core it previously had.
A secondary concurrent thread, then, of this process, after the primacy of biological mortality itself, is the position afforded to man’s actions alone. As the individual organisms that act as agents throughout history, one can state that Man or Men, Hero or Tribe/People, is that which acts in such a manner as to sublimate myths and actions into the coherent Culture itself. Or, distinct human groups and distinct Cultures are one and the same.
This of course is nothing new for those familiar with Spengler, blood and race are of the utmost importance to this process of Cultural evolution. And, in general, Spengler’s entire oeuvre is dense with—as viewed from our contemporary, postmodern viewpoint—hyper-human language, terminology and signifiers that are consistently bandied around in defence of the term ‘human’ itself. Notions linked to authenticity, blood, race, soil, revolution, worker, loyalty, honour, class, hierarchy, nobility, etiquette, nation, etc. Each of which, in entering into the self-referentiality of the modern day, is quickly deflated into something that one is unable to truly pinpoint.
Spengler (who I utilize in this essay for the ease of which he writes confidently as a prophet) and that which is Spenglerian, then, is synonymous with a definition of the human that is primitively intuitive, but contemporaneously elusive, archaic, and borderline delusory. There is also, then, a convenience that one finds with Spengler’s writing in that it manages to toe the line between taking the aforementioned anthropocentric master-signifiers (nation, hero, blood, etc) at face-value, whilst simultaneously tracking their demise, and eventual linguistic dissolution.
Spenglerian cycles track the quilting and eventual fraying of the word ‘human’ as projected by numerous Cultures and, in-keeping with this cyclic view of history, signification also dies. To move forward from the Spenglerian assessment of history—which, in carefully studying Spengler, even his detractor’s must admit a prophetic specificity that it is at times alarming—appears to be an impossible task. The already-defeated question as per Spenglerian continuation would be only what form the next cycle of history, culture, and (eventual) civilization would take? Well, Spengler here too is prescient.
Starting from pre-culture and progressing through the ‘early’ and ‘late’ stages, risen culture, as previously mentioned, eventually stagnates and crystallizes into civilization, devoid of any further potentiality. During the transition period between late-stage culture and civilization, the very idea of the ‘state’ and/or national governments are developed. The city and the urban overthrows agriculture and rurality as the place of meaning, and money begins its slow infiltration into the workings of nations.
In short, eventually we arrive at the idea of the ‘economy’. Toeing the line alongside democracy, for a while the economy is a mere agent of quantification with regard the quality of the democratic state. But soon enough, that which is descriptive (economy) equally sublimates that which was intended to be prescriptive (democratic rule) and, in Spengler’s own words, ‘Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.‘ (TDOTW, p.396). And it is here that one must take a drastic and irreversible detour from cyclicity, into pure non-linearity.
For in arguing that as per the eventual fates of the Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Indian, and Chinese cultures, the money-spirit too would once again be seen as the deathblow of the Western Kulturen, Spengler doubles-down on his own anthropocentric bias, therein raising the ‘economy’ or ‘the money-spirit’ only to the position of an infinite culture-buffer, as opposed to—as I am arguing—its reality as an inhumanly constructive force in and of itself. Spengler, and this is an understandable oversight that one can’t truly argue as ignorance from the position of the early 1900s, never lets go of the human. If something is beginning it is from a spark of human genius; if it is growing it is due to Great Men; if it is dying it is because the men have run out of ideas; and if it is dead, it is because the men have become ‘dumb and enduring’(TDOTW).
We see this anthropocentric oversight all the more clearly in Spengler’s final work The Hour of Decision (1933), a work detailing, albeit rather hastily, the destiny and demise of the West. As he writes, ‘His doings, his attitude, intention, thought, experience, inevitably form an element, however small, in this [Cultural] development, if he confuses this with purely economic questions, it is already a sign of the decay that is going forward within himself too, whether he feels and knows it or not.’ (THOD, p.65) this is to say that man and the human, is here, for Spengler, (once again unsurprisingly) of the utmost importance. Yet, with regard to the quoted confusion of man with cultural development as ‘all under-economy’, it is clear, in our own time, that discussion regarding social, familial, vital, political, and even religious questions have all been subsumed under into the ‘econ-spirit’. Questions of existence and experience are now mere questions of GDP and statistics. As such, ‘there remain nothing but the “laws” of money and prices, which find expression in statistics and graphs’ (THOD, p.80).
Furthermore, the prior political foundational structures of abstract nations, groups, and individuals, once used for ideological assessment of economic movements, have also been subsumed into the econ-spirit: ‘The place of class was to be taken by that which has no class: money and intelligence, counting-house and lecturer’s chair, arithmeticians and clerks; in place of form-ordered existence, life without form, manners, obligations, respect.’ (THOD, p.83). The eventual phase of the nation whereby it is taken over by the state, the ‘government, as the meaning and duty of the state existence, is either opposed, derided or degraded to the level of a party business.’ (THOD, p.90). The final hurrah of the human, then, is nothing more than ‘the method by which with the least exertion the most money and pleasure can be secured: panem et circenses‘ (Bread and circuses) (THOD, p.99). This is our current standpoint: Man is number, class is nothing, the state is a business, and our telos is money and pleasure; the human, a being possessed by the econ-spirit and thus itself sublimated to the ‘economic life’ (THOD, p.100).
Spengler’s cyclic theory—though at points declaring that humanity will eventually meet its demise by the technology humanity itself has fashioned—is its own Gordian killer. For what can a cyclic history do but die? If it didn’t, would it not be a contradiction of its own terms, not a deathblow, but a lifeblow to the theory itself. As such, the mathematics of cyclicity is forcibly bound to the thermodynamics of finitude. As if to argue that infinity exists, but before man arrives at the place where parallel lines meet, he will die. Cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death, when applied to the purity of mathematics, can be nothing but the most human of transferences; man before math, an embarrassment of intelligence. Whether it’s Cultural lifecycles, boom-and-busts, Kondratiev waves, secular cycles, or long cycles, the mathematic foundation is forced to abide by a limitation only its abuser can see; a scarcity and finitude that is alien to its language.
It is here where Spengler finally makes a misstep, one which (as I have already mentioned), we can forgive him for making. For in truth, he was an obsessive reader, researcher, and macro-historian, but he was no Nostradamus. The error in question is regarding the term ‘economic life’, the latter part of which is notably in agreement with the Spenglerian notion of Cultural mortality and cyclicity. Or, economic life for Spengler is alive only in the sense that is existence is tethered to the fleshy-machinations of man, and as such is disallowed investigation as to its own agency.
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Investigating into this ‘agency’, I turn to the work of Nick Land, ‘When considered as rigid designations, Atomization, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Modernity name exactly the same thing.’ (The Atomization Trap). Even though Spengler as pessimistic advocate for the human and Land as optimistic advocate of the inhuman, appear to be situated at opposite ends of the spectrum of historic understanding, their respective apprehensions of said history are mirrored by the self-same force, namely, intelligence.
For Spengler, the driving force of history is a form of creative/original/Cultural intelligence that abides by the limitations of organism, and for Land a pure intelligence that is Intelligence unto itself, the limitations of which are the scarcity of existence itself, inclusive of the non/inhuman. So wherein Spengler, as romantically attached to the human sees the parasitism of the ‘money-spirit’ as a terminal point of Cultural stagnation, Land views such a moment as the forgone conclusion of machinic emancipation from the human. Spenglerian cyclicity is, for Land, convergent intelligence. The question continues, however, for each human being who, in an apt moment of romanticism that would make even Spengler himself blush, would seek to ask, What about us? After this intelligence detachment (which is well under way), what of the ‘human’? This is arguably the question of philosophy going forward and quite helpfully Land has already provided us with an answer, in what I consider to be his most important—yet unsurprisingly elusive—statement:
“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”(Meltdown)
Opening with a fatalist proclamation regarding our collective fate, Land allows for zero, leniency or flexibility where the future of humanity is concerned. Therein we are lead to investigate the assumptive existence of the word ‘human’, and what it exactly might be that we desired to hold onto in the first place. However, as per Land, whatever it is that we seek to retain as per any definition of humanity will not make it out of the near future, leading to the knowledge that what is understood to be human or be defined as human will either A. Be eradicated out of existence, or B. Become mutated to such a degree that it is no longer recognizable as anything definitely human.
Leaning more heavily on a Landian analysis of the future, one would state that A shall follow B. In that, humanity shall become indistinguishable from empty, malleable capital, and eventually eradicated by capitalism’s vampiric agency itself. The hidden implication beneath this statement, then, is that not only does humanity cease to exist in any definitive sense, but as per the statement’s logic, ‘history’ keeps moving forward without man playing a definitively human role.
This detachment of vampire from bait, or economic life from man, brings forth the undead automatization of the former and the eventual dwindling and death of the latter. Regarding the increasing complexification and abstraction of mathematics, this detachment of economic agency from economic flesh, is equally a detachment of a mathematics of infinity, non-linearity, and the exponential from a cornered mathematics of thermodynamics and cyclicity. Maths moves from the hot to the cold. It becomes apparent, post-mortal maths, that this undead economic agency (which most often goes by the name ‘Capitalism’) cannot be understood via a single cohomology, but by different cohomological theories, which, to quote Grothendieck “would be something like different thematic developments, each in its own ‘tempo’, ‘key’ and ‘mode’ (’major’ and ‘minor’), of the same ‘basic motif’ (called ‘motivic cohomological theory’)” (Recoltes et Semailles, as quoted in Contemporary Philosophy of Synthetic Mathematics).
The ultimate base or foundation of this agency is, then, not so much of no importance, but is unable to be grasped in any singularly mathematical fashion. The agency’s ontological reality is an abstract quilting that is only ever a ‘quilt’ in name. The human, so much as it still exists, is left trailing far behind in thought (left to a paradoxically ever-expanding and yet dwindling terminology) and in form (the finite watching the infinite escape without means of true communication). The hodge-podge of fleshy mathematical terms – stood before an ever-fluxing, eternally plastic, autonomous, and undead vector of Hell – are forever caught in the past, left to analyize a long since forgotten blip in the grand scheme of inhuman futures.
Man is not outflanked, but outgrown by that which is beyond mortality. In the death of all that is humanly definitive, dated-humans cannot fathom the abstract arbitrariness of Capitalism’s productive agency that is simply production-for-itself. The line is purposeful from point to point. The cycle begets rebirth. The undead motivic dissipates with each moment, veiling what arbitrary purpose it has by means of an accelerative effect that far surpasses human comprehension. That which makes it out of the near future is beyond line and cycle, and has no capacity of thought for that and those which remain within the bounds of infant geometry.
References
Grothendieck, A. (1992). Récoltes et Semailles. éditeur non identifié.
Land, N. (2017). The Atomization Trap. Originally published on JacobiteMag.
Land, N. (1995). Meltdown. Cybernetic culture research unit. http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
Spengler, O. (1923). The Decline of the West (Vols. 1–2).
Spengler, O. (1934). Routledge Revivals: The Hour of Decision : Germany and World-Historical Evolution. Routledge.
Zalamea, F. (2012). Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics. Urbanomic.
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