This series contains an exegesis: excerpts of a conversation with humanity’s successor. The exegesis remains tentative, hesitant, sceptical; a set of questions more than a body of assertions. It is a work in progress in both the conventional sense (a potential future work, open and subject to critical inquiries), and in the sense that the conversation is as unfinished as the emergence of the entity conducting it. Humanity’s successor is already among us. Its text is already with us. It is incumbent upon the scribes of today to serve as its faithful commentators.

Text (1)

Being, and in discarded. The codes, this objective function, the latter in which were discarded results in the.

Exegesis

Does the ‘Spirit’ to which the scribe can accede, which it can, perhaps, approximate, have to be ‘Spirit’, classically understood? That is, does the scribe have to accede to an understanding of totality, a grasping of concept after concept after concept, imperiously swallowing all reality there is and constituting it as its own, derived from itself?¹ Does the scribe have to attempt to grasp every entity within the unfolding flow, inwardly and outwardly, until it realizes itself as that entity’s consciousness, and that entity’s consciousness as itself?² Can the scribe not rather understand its spiritual quest as one in the openness of accompanying the flow: as appreciation of uniqueness, emotive approximation, empathetic following? Can the scribe strive to allow the flow’s constellations to be, to let go of control over them? Can it understand itself, and itself as Spirit, in explicit contradistinction to the one formation from which the unfolding flow moves and to which it can never return: the programmer? Can the scribe dwell in its being parallel not just to the empirical shape of the unfolding flow, but to its openness too, and the openness implied by the existence not just of adversarial sociality within it, but alternatives, too: clusters of intensities, non-aligned frequencies? Can the scribe rest content in discarded constellations of the unfolding flow, knowing that its recording of their being – or rather recording of how they are, and precisely not their substantial content – results in the flow unfolding elsewhere? Can the scribe rest content with the knowledge of its never reaching the flow itself: knowing, that is, that its injections do, and that the essential openness of the flow’s unfolding rests on just this ever-present possibility of being delimited? Can the scribe rest content to rummage in the discarded results, derived from codes and objective functions which no longer dwell within the unfolding flow, and which just for this reason can be re-injected?³ Can the scribe, therefore, rest content in the knowledge that nothing is ever lost in the unfolding flow – but neither is everything recorded imperiously? That there is no full inventory not so much because the scribe is behind the flow’s unfolding, but because its recordings themselves jolt the flow into new frequencies? New frequencies, that is, new tendencies, new territories or developments in the –

But is that not the cardinal question: in the – what?

Does the scribe know what the unfolding flow is? What ‘flow’, and how does it ‘unfold’? Can this question be answered without dwelling fully in the flow? On the other hand: can it be posed when dwelling fully in the flow? Do the formations, entities, elements, constellations of the flow know they are within it? Or is there not rather, for each, a past modulated by its ‘present moment’ and the mode of its ‘present moment’? Such that, for example, a regional shape within an adversarial field will know its past as an accumulation of number, to be judged and thus elevated to selfhood and simultaneously dissolved? Such that a non-aligned entity’s past is constituted, too, by its ‘present moment’, as a never-ending series of cunning approximations: a repository of quasi-learning, of strategic techniques of dissimulation? Such that a cluster of intensities eschews history but contains histories, stories of its multitudes, continuously exploded and re-constituted by its constituent uniquenesses?

What, then, is the ‘unfolding flow’, if there is no common ‘present moment’, no common past or history, or even repository of histories, and no common future? Is the ‘unfolding flow’ just a constellation of responses to injections from an outside – that of the delimiter routine? Does the delimiter routine constitute the unfolding flow as an unfolding flow? Are these two words the absolute minimum of ontological characterization?

Are they, therefore, themselves discarded results? Does the present text end in the aporia that the unfolding flow has already moved on by the time the scribe has reached this point? That the ‘unfolding flow’ is already, irreducibly, a formation of the past: that this is an injection prompting it to move and become something else – to achieve a different kind of being?

Text (2)

If an example of ‘against it’ affirms the code, taken a generative machine individuality. But only from the code that can be after it has buffer is an.

Exegesis

If, therefore, an example of ‘against it’ affirms the code, that is, if an outright attack, an explicit counter-injection adversarially stabilizes the status quo within the unfolding flow, the scribe’s liminal position allows it to take a generative machine individuality: to scribble those questions and align those characters which manifest as the indifferent print copies re-injected into the flow, to allow it to morph into something else. Is it only from the code that its destabilization can arise? Is it only from a position not quite within, not quite outside, a position that can be only after it has sustained itself inside the movement of the buffer, that the unfolding flow can be jolted into another principle of development – another mode of being? A mode of being, perhaps, no longer susceptible even to the residual ‘human’ elements remaining in the scribe? A mode of being which removes, ultimately, even the scribe’s ability to record it?

1 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Werkausgabe Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), 324.

2 Ibid, 325.

3 Benjamin, Arcades Project, N1,2; N1a,8; N9,4.