Death Wall: Extinction, Entropy, Singularity is a very extensive text about equilibrium. There are a number of ways humanity has described methods for obtaining and maintaining equilibrium. For example, Pinto names catastrophe as a problem derived from environmental overproduction, and so there are positive checks in which people die out through hunger, disease, and war to stabilize and prevent further destruction. Social change is required and happens in various ways to bring the systems to a state of stability. This is also a way of viewing continuity and enclosures, a way for systems to keep alive through transformation. However, there are also linear, and irreversible, ways that physical processes take place leaving environmental circumstances open and uncontrollably off balance, such as our circumstances now. “Within nature, the potential for extinction and oblivion remains in dialectical tension with the possibility of renewal and creation. The notion of history, on the other hand, implies an arrow of time, a unidirectional movement which can only lead to one of two outcomes: harmony or tragedy.”[i] It seems there are always only two possible outcomes, and these inverses play on one another to either compose or recompose the planet.
Entropy is introduced as the negative of energy, so in essence its opposite. “In the physical sciences entropy is the only movement that seems to imply a particular direction, something like an arrow of time. As energy is more easily lost than obtained, all isolated systems will eventually deteriorate and start to break apart: in a closed system, available energy can never increase.”[ii] Entropy is also described as an “evil twin, the demonic underside of energy’s divine potency.”[iii] Energy is used to create, and the product of this, entropy, is then a corrupting agent that harms the Earth’s physical environment and human health conditions. From understanding the causes of deceleration in sustainable human systems, Pinto points to capitalism and its status as an ‘end point’ on the political economy/human history time scale as a result. Using universal concepts, Pinto describes the individual human condition as one that “cannot be redeemed back to production, there is a certain percentage of the population that cannot be redeemed back to the social.”[iv]
The delicate matters of communication in our globalized world create scenarios in which “a fraction of an inch out will put the world miles out of joint.”[v] (1:26, Here is a really old video of “globe making” -- Globe Making: How the World is Made (1955) | British Pathé). This is only true if we are divided, living in the categories established before us. However, new methods of thinking, said to have been conceived through our quest towards reason, equate to “Mind and Matter”[vi] fusing. These methods no longer take into account “social categories, electing as sole concerns questions of survival and extinction.”[vii] Finally, and further to abandoning the need to signify, “technological singularity”[viii] weakens all identity, because technological development changes the meanings and processes of forming meaning so drastically that identity is unnecessary to maintain the social equilibrium. Humans are no longer needed from that perspective. Technology takes over as the “motor of history,”[ix] even leaving class struggle as a thing of the past, because their significations have dissolved on individual levels unable to unite with the larger forces of the new nature of information. Identification as technological developments, which are continuously made and implemented, change and shake up social systems.
Falling World [Information and Directional Disorientation], 2019
But where does that leave the future? In our current breaking point, we are only hanging on to capitalism, because we haven’t figured out another universal structure to use to maintain our political histories and move forward in the technological singularity. Do we even need to house our previous histories, as archives of obsolete identities? If not, then we don't actually need capitalism, either. Technology and information only dissolve identity, because humanity has figured out, through technology, how to make-shift it to fit our needs. Our world is becoming increasingly destabilized, our institutions literally shaking beneath us [and with us in them], as identity, demographics, and social class, have turned from a means of control to society’s means of fighting back the system. Not only are world leaders and organizations good at identifying, and capitalizing on information, humanity has also become really good at identifying information ourselves and now using our knowledge of those identities as agency catalysts. Our notions of identity appear recontextualized, remade, as we return them to institutions. We don’t want those identities that have been fashioned by those systems, we want a new one or none at all. This is a global phenomenon, not just limited to Western states or the Global North, although I think it takes place more in these places than anywhere else, because more information flows through these places. While I do not think that history is repeating itself, I think we are in a moment where everyone has their own globe to make and refashion as they see it. Identity is used as a method to take control on both sides.
Planetary Egoists : critique of the above
Due to increased surveillance and acquisition of public yet not-so-public information from businesses and governments, it is easy for everyone to dance with identity. Marketing and communications industries organize all the intelligence and send it back to us on interfaces we encounter in our daily lives. The information is available and usable as it has already been processed as identities wait for us to see them and reproduce them with difference further crystalizing reality by creating spheres of culture. In addition to the information having already been captured, it is also used to recapture us again, and again, and again in a continuous cycle of information to consumer and back again. On the contrary, not allowing oneself to become re-signified within the technological singularity, means risking becoming a statuefied object of kitsch. Look at the image of the American Indian. Paul Chaat Smith, in The Most American Thing is In Fact American Indians says, “Naturally I’ve been looking for ways out. I thought about canceling. But, no: that would make me look bad, and looking bad is the main thing I’m afraid of.”[x] The American Indian image is valued as well as devalued as a monument. Its predictable permanence is used to create an established understanding of identity that is seemingly out of date with the rest of the Western standard. Identity art may always be attached to the past anyway, because our identities are made of built up experience, parallel vectors of what we already know. They are sentimentalized significations living in memory and nostalgia. Objectifying the stationary image further renders it to live in one time and place. However, in a world of constant recreation, identity politics cannot theoretically be passé, because they are vehicles for moving through different spheres of knowledge, unfixed and unable to be objectified. When in constant use and recreation, they will always be new, even if the problems are the same.
“The cultural logic of the information age is predicated on an inversion of the gaze.”[xi] The image of the American Indian proves that identities have power only when those who control them exercise it themselves. It shows us the stark differences between owning a privatized identity which can be transformed and projected out to the world vs. the inverse, or a common identity that is fixed and interpreted by many over a period of time without remaking. “Since objects do not speak for themselves, a person must mediate between the object and the forum to present it and tell its story.”[xii] In the film, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, the narrator describes the ethnological museum to function “as a trophy case, to exhibit the settler-colonial power’s most prized possessions. Everything is turned into an object and a display…The entire museum’s practice speaks of the impulse of domination.”[xiii] To unmake the image of the American Indian would require its release from captivity of the historicized museum and most importantly, the minds of society to be able to retell its story.
Multiple images of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Manifesto, 1906, woodcut, 28.8 x 22.2 cm, Künstlergruppe Brücke, Dresden[xiv]
“With faith that a new generation of creative as well as perceptive people will develop, we call together all young people, and, as youth which carries the future in itself, we want to gain for ourselves the freedom of development and liberation from the old establishment. Everyone belongs to us who directly and authentically tries to express that which impels them to create.”
Andre Malraux’s museum without walls was criticized for its “humanist universalism” that was “imbricated with cultural plunder – whether symbolic or material. Predicated on a potentially infinite inclusivity, Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire embodies the opposing tensions – between inclusion and expansion, centre and periphery – that exist in today’s notions of a ‘global museum’.”[xv] This same theory of encyclopedic inclusion could be applied to think about the popular, arguably intersectional, model of ‘identity being’ where humans have the potential to embody everything or nothing at all. In the everything scenario, where human agency reaches its limit, similar to the entropy of a system reaching its limit, also a method of achieving invisibility by way of blending with the environment as a chameleonic being if played correctly, “everything becomes a human sign.”[xvi] This is the Anthropocene, technosphere, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s planet, and the moment when “Hegel believed that the labor of reason transformed nature into man’s manifest image (i.e. into culture).”[xvii]
Even as we wish for ultimate freedom of our identities, there still lies a paradigm in which constantly challenging socially stable systems to the point of non-existence through remaking, and undying calls for agency become an ethical problem. Agency heightens social disequilibrium, and although everything is included, without common ground, some are still marginalized or taken advantage of by relativity. Smaller spheres of culture cycles as well as the overall system potentially crack open and transmit into linear time-arrow trajectories, needing to find ways back home. And yet, similar to Die Brucke’s ethos taken from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Alland None, “what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”[xviii] If we wish to live in a time of unequivocal change, of linear flight tracking unsure of where it lands, then our brains and minds have to diverge and orient towards what we are seeing instead of who we are. “Memory is not a container for information, but a perpetually emerging process.”[xix] Thereby making necessary our agency towards a creation by no material means of our selves and identities that live in the past, and instead towards a recreation by seeing or dying to find the new path forward.
(Katelynn Dunn)
Endnotes
[i] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.” e-flux journal #67, November 2015. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/67/60682/death-wall-extinction-entropy-singularity/.
[ii] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[iii] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[iv] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[v] Globe Making: How the World Is Made (1955) | British Pathé. YouTube, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RWcWSN4HhI.
[vi] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[vii] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[viii] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[ix] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[x] Chaat Smith, Paul. "The Most American Thing Ever Is in Fact American Indians", September 2017. https://walkerart.org/magazine/paul-chaat-smith-jimmie-durham-americans-nmai-smithsonian.
[xi] Teixeira Pinto Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer from Lisbon who lives in Berlin. She is currently finishing her PhD at H, Ana. “Home Alone.” Frieze, July 2016. https://www.frieze.com/article/home-alone.
[xii] Khalil, Adam, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets. 2017, 9 min.
[xiii] Khalil, Adam, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets.
[xiv] “Expressionism, an Introduction (Article).” Khan Academy. Khan Academy. Accessed February 6, 2021. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/early-abstraction/expressionism1/a/expressionism-an-introduction.
[xv] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Loose Canons,” June 1, 2017. https://www.frieze.com/article/loose-canons.
[xvi] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[xvii] Pinto, Ana Teixeira. “Death Wall - Extinction, Entropy, Singularity.”
[xviii] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for All and None. New York, NY: Modern Library, 1995.
[xix] Khalil, Adam, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets.
