Negation

Negation is an irreducible property. Speaking of ontology, epistemology: these are all different flavours on the same buffet cart. Where we speak of a thing, a system, a person, a point of view, a technology or a system of belief – it is always from that system’s point of view or aspirationally-privileged perspective. We are conditioned by language as much as by experience to a self-reflexive, psychological and teleological symmetry of identity and presence, of reality and value or meaning.

From the point of view of a Subject in language or logic, we are always looking back out from this half-mirrored labyrinth of symbol and abstraction, of circularly-tautological self-reference or definition, towards an Other, another place or thing or system and perspective and this other place is always a foundational negation of that which we inhabit.

An irreducibly uncertain and indefinite-extensible logic allows us to intuit that this vacuum in some sense “beyond” is also endemic and distributed across the entire surface of that systemic or logical identity we inhabit. The negation is not a negative property, it is a constructive one but it builds in terms of complex spaces and logical abstractions; not of bricks, mortar or flesh and bone.

A final note on logic:

As it is not and can never be complete or entirely self-consistent, completely enclosed or finalised in anything but the most trivial of circumstances – it must forever remain uncertain. Trusting logic allows us to build bridges, design and inhabit integrated Global communications systems, and to send human beings to space but we forever refuse to acknowledge or even recognise and comprehend that there is a foundational, irremediable discontinuity in rationality, philosophy, reality and – indeed – in ourselves.

What to do when the ramshackle,  organic and volatile complexity of the world endlessly invalidates the systems of thought and belief through which we reflexively define our Selves and our collaborative belief systems, hollows out all aspirations to certainty and meaning?

There is no real answer, but having found ourselves already stepped across the event horizon of this asymptotic mystery and hyper-inflating self-referential and self-propagating techno-logical information system – there is nothing left to do but bootstrap, recursively lift ourselves up, into, through and as this irreducible emptiness and to endlessly accelerate, now, towards the unattainable center of the void.