The In-Significance of Being

A Brief Genealogy and Becoming of the Fragmentation of Man

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When the sun first rose within the mind and heart of man, that event was perceived as something emerging from the outside and, at the same time, as a presence swelling from within — an eruption that made human life absolute, binding it to itself and to reality in a single, indivisible gesture. Prayer and rational speculation had not yet entered the human posture toward the world: rite and intuition were the first human deities, the original guardians of this age of images and trembling.

High then rose that sun in the sky, and just as high rose the gaze and the sentiments of men: they already imagined themselves among the heavens. But as their instincts climbed upward, so too did they fall downward—widening, deepening, thickening—and thus man began to pray in his own way, this time to gods born from his needs, ascending just a little higher (though not necessarily further) than himself. If at first he still possessed a kind of attachment to the earth and to his own body, his gaze nevertheless remained fixed on what lies beyond immediate contingency (though never beyond reality). Yet he eventually lost trust in his own existence and sought, in the unknown, a path to salvation and ready-made answers.

But the unknown of minds and spirits does not refer solely to the primordial chaos in which existence moves: men willingly place the Veil before their senses and intellect, refusing to contemplate — let alone experience — the necessary mystery of returning to the fragmentation of being, to its volatility and its eternal hunger. It is the mystery of those who feel and know nothing, who hide behind formulas and laws their terror before the Absolute.

For both believers and scientists, That holds no real importance, because what matters is not the brutality and tangled rootedness of all things in the torrent of life, but the certainty of life built atop the void of every construction — the certainty that one’s foundations, thanks to one deity or another, must and should remain standing before any calamity.

What a pity that man cannot distinguish the horrible from the fictitious; he cannot tell apart his hunger for certainties from the real Absolute. This very Absolute is the cyclone and the inferno that pushes man to construct his own laboratory — a place where he may test out fears, experiment escape routes, gather certainties only to watch them vanish, and then feel rise within himself the desire to start all over again, like a machine already programmed. An android composed of forces that shake his nervous system and grant him the greatest Promethean curse: consciousness.

In the Absolute of man, everything beyond strictly organic necessity is an illusion of being something — and especially someone — an approximation of the unknown, sparks of hammers striking the anvil of the unconscious, energies that drive man to exhaustion and to catharsis… which will never end except with natural death.

There is no purification, no cleansing from the imperfection and transgression of the profane — for nothing needs cleansing except what one believes to be dirty, not inherently impure. The machine-man continuously reaches such a level of intensity that his actions take on a shape and force which, in all the intervals between these peaks, reveal themselves through different and more expansive sensations. In other words, all our actions seem volitional; and in these interludes of human will and half-consciousness they prepare themselves in time and space, poised to reappear triumphantly, only to exhaust themselves again — without, however, ceasing to exist or to desire this very exhaustion.

Let this not be mistaken for some nursery rhyme meant to portray man as blessed in this condition — for even in his mechanical body he is not safe, nor can he foresee what comes next. Praise be to Mishima and Mayakovsky!

For this is the machine-man who, without any predetermined path, reaches the ecstasy of the automatism of consciousness, instincts, and their raw potential. There are no guides because no paths exist, except those traced unwillingly by the general will of the organism and by conscious and unconscious impulses stirred by the one force that moves everything: consumption. Let us repeat it once more, like a shamanic ritual: produce, consume, rot.

A fragmented being who, despite himself, insists on remaining whole; who, even when aware of his innate volatility, cannot find his permanent center of gravity… unless that center coincides with the abyss toward which all poets, madmen, and prophets wander — an abyss whose very immersion becomes dream and nightmare, where one can only drift among what is (not) seen and what is merely felt. In either case, this being can only be reborn each time with a new degree of fever and illness; to the energetic expenditure of forces is added their reaccumulation through the adrenal sickness from which the agent suffers: schizophrenia, narcissism.

One might almost say that psychiatry and neurology attempt to brand as “degeneration” those mental and physical states on which every human feeds and through which he thrashes.

For the “man of the dream,” the structural complex is what nourishes the whole action of reason, and thus the Meaning on which humanity feeds is always and necessarily a remedy — one that alters the terminal illness of the consumer-generator malaise, which is never cured nor eased but merely inhibited or exacerbated in different forms. What always remains is the being immersed in Azathoth’s eternal dream, where there is no escape, for there is no true malice in dreaming of entities such as Leviathan, capital, morals, religions, gods, or the very states in which one believes oneself emancipated from the real. The point is that a certain reality always persists, for men try to resist the natural nightmare with Apollonian imagination, and in trying to liberate themselves they become ever more ensnared.

Action for the sake of action must always be justified — and that justification comes from the abstract sense of what one does. Thus one does not live the unknown and the descent into Thanatos through the simple release of exhaustion; rather, one postpones and inhibits the ruinous potential of the organism until the continuous abjuration of these creations that seize hold of us.

Seeing all this, one might ask: how can consciousness fall into the hands of what it has generated? How can forces that create be inhibited by the very states fabricated to host them?

From here, one may presume that the unity and all the legislative constraints of being cannot subsist in the relational world — neither internally nor externally. In these collisions, contrasts, and sublimations there are positive and negative modalities, but no synthesis remains, except for the becoming of something more transcendent: the coincidence of chance and the perpetual refounding of the Machine, which fashions categories, intuitive impulses, and rational readings of phenomena, shaping man in its own image.

In the Absolute, therefore, lie also the stratified and mysterious relations that self-organize their own self-destruction: not a process or will to create, but the impulse toward the intensive use of pleasure and force; and at the same time the impulse toward the sublime — an erotic satisfaction of reason and rationality.

Thus, reconnecting the concepts of Absolute, Machine, and machine-man, the resulting picture is this: the Absolute is the real in which beings and objects live, clash, and confront each other, and whose very reality is determined by the relations and syntheses occurring among them. Beyond this, what we may call their “essence” is determined by four components:

1. passive unconscious — the organism’s biological and psychological processuality;

2. active unconscious — the general and particular instincts that appear with immediacy and are therefore more easily grasped by reason;

3. passive reason — the individual and collective mechanisms of superstructures and artifices;

4. active reason — the source of dream and form, of abstraction and the sublime.

Like the tripartition of spirit-soul-body, if the Absolute belongs to spirit, the Machine may be defined thus: it is the container of the tendencies of an age, a civilization, a community. And more than a container, the Machine is a sentient instrument that intensifies those tendencies until it drives them to catharsis—after which a new cycle of consumption begins. A particulate vector that, by interfacing man with Nothingness and the Absolute, drives him toward both and dissolves him in the interval, until he splits and becomes an abstract entity endowed with primordial force and ferocity.

Let us be clear: this is not an immutable metaphysical principle detached from context. The Machine, too, has a life of its own—one that operates within the determinations and unsaid mechanisms of all human structures and superstructures. The machinic is thus a perpetually renewed product of contingencies, functioning as an “intermediary” between mortal consumption and the indistinct, excited passion of man. The Machine also becomes a justificatory self-deception: the chain of pretexts and psychophysiological mechanisms used to grant meaning to the primordial impulse to satisfy both bestial instincts and the longing for beatitude of being. It is the vessel and receptor of the sacred and profane, both of which shift their hues and constructions time after time, including the narratives and emotions that push us toward them.

And from here we reach its most perfect and transgressive creation: the machine-man — the human being as he is, who deludes himself into believing he is a subject in existence, whose only engine is the ceaseless becoming of desire and self-objectification. Man, though possessing his own will and reason, ends up not exactly as a slave of the Machine, but as one of its programs — a string of code among many.

And now, in conclusion: with what kind of future, with what hyperstition, do we wish to appear in the coming decades? Here, nothing is praised or cursed, for man himself is pure act and damned consciousness. Seeing this, perhaps all he needs is a push — to slip into the abyss he already contemplates, to crash at maximum speed, to be incinerated and to rise again as something emerging from the beyond.

More explicitly: humanity is only a structure man has created to confront not only the perishability of existence and its primordial fear — as Nietzsche already affirmed — but also to better restrain and inhibit the mechanical and instinctual forces that shape him. Thus, by shedding his fictitious substrate of reasons and systems, unveiling himself as an excited body and desiring mind, man will not live better or more consciously — but it will be his joyous unconsciousness and raw energy that make him live.

Man — too small for a universe too vast, ever expanding, ever silent — is seized by the whispers of a present and a time that promise him Identity, the illusion of not being merely a drifting fragment; whispers of a beyond that promises eternity and the fulfillment of his impulses. And so he yields to these chants and repetitive beats.

Man, who has always believed himself a unified organism capable of understanding the world, ends up staring only at his shadow — fearing it, disgusted by it, yet longing to enlarge it and deepen it.

But this has already been predicted, arranged, ordained: man has no way out. He must either become schizophrenic within the Machine — or cease to exist.

The In-Significance of Being