Catastrophe

We are currently in a catastrophe, at a point from which things will be different than before.

We have reached this catastrophic point because things can no longer go on as before. So far, we have progressed from Abstraction to higher and higher abstraction [⇒ What High-Abstractions Do]: from manipulation to image-making and text-writing to calculation. Beyond the dimensionless point (the calculus) it does not go on in the same direction. For better or worse, we have to turn around and go back: from abstraction to the Concrete, from the point to the lifeworld, from subjectivizing to projecting. But such a way back is not a relapse into the "primitive", because this is hopelessly lost. It is a path toward projected alternatives to the lost "primitive."

Back to Child-making: All the techniques outlined in the first paragraph merge into what is meant here by "calculating": the technically perfected Population Planning, the virgin picking from stored sperm, but also that woman and man who consider with each other before coitus the pros and cons of making children. All these are symptoms of the present crisis. All designing (also that of children) must start from this crisis. It must recompute the calculated into alternative concreteness. What comes out of it, if it succeeds, can hardly be distinguished from the lost "primitive". A densely enough scattered hologram of a table, for example, would be, if it succeeded, indistinguishable from a "perceived given" table.

The same applies to the irresponsible intercourse without condoms just discussed. It would also be, if it succeeded (an improbable hypothesis), a recomputation from previously calculated.

If one looks at the Hologram taken here as an example structurally, then actually no difference between it and the table is to be determined: Both are scatterings of particles. If one looks at it genetically, however, they are opposites: The table is representational – opposes us, makes us its subjects – and the hologram is projected: We designed it, are its projects. To say this in a Heideggerian way: the table conditions us and the hologram testifies us. This is what was meant in the first paragraph.

So far, children have been planned (calculated) more or less well, progressively better, and this is expected to increase. There will always be unplanned (unwanted) children, but the margin of error will become smaller and smaller. It cannot go on like this, because it must end in the futility of the whole child-making.

Therefore, one must stop planning children and start designing them. If this should succeed, then this would look exactly like animal copulation. It would be a recomputation of the lost "primitive". But "genetically" it would be the exact opposite: We would then not be subjects, but projects of the child designing orgasm. We would then design the child not for the sake of life (for the sake of the future child), but on the contrary for the Love of the Possible Child. And this love would then be one among the virtualities that are inherent in the emergence in the other. In other words, the orgasmic intertwining holds creative possibilities, and one of them is the designing of children.

Unfortunately, this is what it sounds like when one tries to put the creative frenzy into clear terms (to do art criticism): The creative ardor is lost. It is talked to pieces [...]. ⇒ Pulverized in Calculi.

FLUSSER, Vilém, 1994. Vom Subjekt zum Projekt: Menschwerdung. Juni 1994. Bensheim und Düsseldorf: Bollmann. Schriften / Vilém Flusser, 3. ISBN 3 927901 387. pdf

VOSS, Martin, 2006. Symbolische Formen : Grundlagen und Elemente einer Soziologie der Katastrophe. Online. transcript Verlag. [Accessed 20 February 2021]. ISBN 978-3-89942-547-5. Available from: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22760

p. 111N1: Niklas Luhmann (cf. e.g. Luhmann 2004: 146, 158, 160) and other systems theorists speak here of the "Blind Spot" and of the fact that the observer only observes what he can observe and that he cannot see what he cannot see. This formulation of the "blind spot" gives the impression that there is a clear boundary between the observed and the "blind spot". Here, however, it is decisive that what remains withdrawn from conscious observation nevertheless constitutively enters into the observation, it constitutively co-determines the meaning of the observed. The unobserved is therefore not divorced from the observed, it is a part of it.

The observer observes more than he believes to observe, he can observe what he believes not to be able to observe, as long as he does not believe to be able to observe only what he thinks to be able to observe; then he begins to close himself to the "Surplus of Observation". To observe does not mean to distinguish in the sense of "drawing a clear boundary", to observe means to overweight meanings relationally to other meanings, completely without sharp separations.