Transcendental Waste
The Egyptian word tekhenu means “to pierce.” Obelisks in Egypt were named tekhenu for their phallic-structure represented an object that was “to pierce the sky.” An obelisk is a structure that is supposed to represent or appear as a ray of light; this would imitate the way a sunbeam looks as it pierces the clouds.
Many ancient world structures filled a similar purpose in terms of their connection to the celestial realm. For example, Pyramids were the resting place to what people considered at their time to be gods incarnate. These tombs were often filled with luxury goods that the Pharoah would take into the afterlife. In a way, these structures are a concrete externalization of Potlaching. The incredible labor time it took to build these structures was a direct result of the ability to maintain and uphold dominion over a group of people. If one can expend a large number of resources and human resources, even if that resource is primarily slaves, it is still seen as a sign of power.
Historically, we can see this pursuit towards uprightness. To Kant, our uprightness directly relates to our spatial-temporal mastery over our environment due to our backbone orientation. The human spine is oriented upright towards the zenith point.
“Triggering the carving up of the planet with reticulating graticules and navigational rhumb lines, sapience’s conquering of global space proceeds from and rests upon a lumbar foundation whose verticality sets our species apart, instigating a ratio-technical line of development extending from the first anthropoid’s binocular gaze upon its forelimb workspace all the way tothe geostationary satellite high above. What Kant’s spinal thought- experiment hints at, then, is that Homo sapiens’ ability to exert cognizance and control on a planetary scale results from the same species-specific peculiarity as its susceptibility to back pain.” — Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism
In Thomas Moynihans's book, “Spinal Catastrophism,” the author explores the human spine tracing each segment as a temporal stratum, understanding the spine as a “time-machine,” and conceptualizing time as depth. The deeper one goes, the farther back in time one can reach. There are obvious connections to geology that one can make with this model, and Moynihan certainly does.
I will not be going into detail about the book; there is too much territory to cover, but I will be making a simple set of connections relating to the book's theme. The relation of thought to the human mind, of German Idealism and a rational teleological system of which the human spine is a part of and by extension, logical contemplative thought results from biological refinement. To many thinkers, this was the way of understanding rationality and sapience as the direct result of an intelligence optimizing biological processes. This echoes some motifs in Hegel found in Negarestanis's book, “Intelligence and Spirit”. The process onto which one reaches the absolute. Intelligence or Geist is a telos towards complete knowledge, as Negarestani understands it, philosophy as engineering is the construction of Artificial General Intelligence.
I will argue that these conflicting attitudes between Neorationalism and Libidinal Materialism can describe Modernity and its entrapment with phallic upright structures. On one side, the techonomic aggregation of intelligence optimization in super-structures is the direct result of a material externalization of the same process that occurred in humans. A biological process that jumped stratum to complete this teleological process. The frontier of this culminated in the human. It must now be finalized in that which is not reducible to material strata but must move past this material horizon to complete itself.
In contrast, Libidanal Materialism views this as continuing life and expenditure. The uprightness not as a logical intelligence optimization but as lavish expenditure destined to waste. This energy is codified and rationalized, but ultimately, “the feverish nightmare that we call life” is manifested in the form of these megastructures with no purpose. It was always destined for this energy to be wasted; the result was always transcendental waste.
Kant had linked the terrestrial-spinal axis to self-orienting rationality, but for Bataille the excremental effluence of the simian anus is merely rerouted upward — ‘blossoming with the most delirious richness of forms’ — in the ostentatious bulbing of the sapient cranium, a most exotic and wanton flower. The surging gradient of expenditure migrates from digestive-horizontal slope to the more intensified zenith-realm of intelligences. And yet, as Bataille notes, this upward-thrusting ‘liberation of man’ is somewhat end-stopped or bottlenecked by the skull’s right angle. Like the swell of a kinked hose, the perpendicular brain-cap is a ballooning instability. — Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism
Waste can be conceptualized as transcendental. Kant’s noumena can be vulgarly reduced to that which is left-over, that which remains as waste from the systematization of the intuitions and transcendental categories, as not to fall back into Berkeleyan Idealism. Viewing waste in this sense is helpful as it helps conceptualize it as a useful concept, one that captures it and integrates it back, sublimates it into itself. But, waste can be seen as much more than this; it is the horrific excrement of existence itself that which always lies outside of understanding, that which can not be sublimated or incorporated, that which is the eternal remainder.
To be continued in [[ ]] W A S T E: Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Oil, Part II.
