xx
Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist are Swedish philosophers and authors, first of The Futurica Trilogy, consisting of The Netocrats (2000), The Global Empire (2003) and The Body Machines (2009), and later of The Grand Narratology, consisting of Syntheism – Creating God in the Internet Age (2014), Digital Libido – Sex, Power and Violence in The Network Society (2018) and Process and Event (2023).
They lecture across the world on the global internet revolution. As authors, Bard & Söderqvist are pioneers in the literary genre known as futurica, where philosophy, social analysis and future research meet, and as philosophers they are pioneers in the disciplines called narratology and speculative anthropology.
Besides writing and lecturing on all things digital, Alexander Bard is also known as a highly successful music industry executive, record producer, songwriter and artist , involved in over 100 million records sold and billions of music streams consumed, in the 2010s also (in)famous as a flamboyant judge on TV shows Swedish Idol and Sweden’s Got Talent. Jan Söderqvist is a media theorist and film critic/columnist for the leading Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and a magazine developer and editor at the Axess publishing house.
Once upon a time in Stockholm...
Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist first met in 1998. Alexander was then an internationally celebrated pop star and a lecturer at the Stockholm School of Economics with a focus on the Internet revolution. These lectures attracted growing attention with their views on interactivity in general and the Internet in particular. More and more of those who listened urged him to write a book. The idea appealed to Alexander, but he had no desire to do it alone. He wanted to find a partner who could stimulate and complement him.
At this time, Jan was a magazine editor, writer and active in radio and television. Gradually his attention was also increasingly directed towards the emerging network society, which was expressed in several long essays. He was frustrated with the debate that was being conducted and believed that it lacked proper perspective and was outright banal. Maybe he should even write a book on the subject himself?
Then one day Jan received an email from Alexander Bard, who thought they should both meet without specifying why. Alexander had come across Jan's name several times while looking for a suitable companion to write a book with. But it was not clear from the email exactly why Alexander wanted to meet, why a stressed Jan delayed answering. Alexander grew impatient and called again. They both really should meet and discuss interesting things, and Jan needn't have worried, this was anything but a sexual invitation. So now Jan got so curious that he had to answer. It turned out that the men lived very close to each other, on opposite sides of Götgatan on Södermalm in Stockholm.
A dinner date was nailed down.
So one evening they finally met, Alexander offered chicken in a clay pot and plenty of wine, and it quickly became clear to both of them that they could accomplish great things together. The chicken that Jan thought was a bit dry was washed down with many glasses of wine, and before the evening was over they had created a company around their drawing table, and a synopsis for the book that would be titled The Netocrats, and soon translated into more than 20 languages.
The rest is history.
x
Syntheism – Creating God in The I at their disposal. Thefestival
i
new metaphysics be understood, aptly described as a new religion for the Internet Age. However, this is not a religion
Edit with the Docs app
with a God who creates us (or anything else for that matter), but rather a belief that we as humans, with the support of
fantastic new technology, instead create the God that we need. The word for this phenomenon is syntheism, and this
Make tweaks, leave comments, and share
concept is all about us creating the divine rather than blindly submitting to some external patriarch.
with others to edit at the same time.
Digital Libido – Sex, Power and Violence in The Network Society
NO THANKS
Out of the affirmative nihilism rises a new netocratic elite of informationalists, sensocrats and protopians, who replace the old paradigm's upper class of capitalists, politicians and academicians. The key to this paradigm shift is the emergence of the free and open algorithm that defies the lies of the old paradigm, summarized as the corruption by capitalists, the manipulation by politicians and the conformation by academicians. Bard & Söderqvist then warn us that it is an open
GET THE APP
In their fifth book Bard & Söderqvist dem ss involved in an authentic paradigm shift. The old paradigm transitions into the new through a dramatic, dialectical process that rightly deserves to be called apocalyptic, as the whole of human existence is at stake and chaos and anarchy threaten to swallow all of civilization, while this threat is met with frenzied demands for tyranny and carnage. The naive nihilism of the old paradigm in the face of the new becomes cynical, while the ironic nihilism of the new paradigm becomes affirmative.
onstrate the seriousne
manipulation by politicians and the conformation by academicians. Bard & Söderqvist then warn us that it is an open
question whether the false phallus with its closed and centralized sensocracy will prevail in the coming battle. The alternative is that Man in time understands to instead choose the authentic phallus with his open and decentralized senosocracy. The important thing here is that no one can say in retrospect that they did not know what this existential choice was all about.
Process and Event
In their sixth and (most likely) final book Bard & Söderqvist embark on the ultimate philosophical project, namely to rewrite the entire history of ideas from the perspective of a future elite. This pandialectical metaphysics is called transcendental emergentism, and it shrugs off all previous forms of reductionism to physics, matter, biology, consciousness, or whatever else humans have chosen to prioritize throughout the history of philosophy. The lesson from pandialecticism is rather that the most important thing people have devoted themselves to is speculative anthropology, above all the question of how people should be able to build trust amongst each other, even within a larger population than the solid original tribe, called the sociont.
And while speaking of speculative anthropology: if technology has expanded, religion has unfortunately simultaneously imploded ever since the Bronze Age, when the great religions were founded in order to hold together new concepts like cities, nations and empires. The ultimate question is whether the two-headed phallus that the ancient Persians dreamed of 3,700 years ago can be resurrected, or if the world is headed straight into apocalyptic madness by the pillar-saints and boy- pharaohs who have ruled the world ever since humanity was infantilized by the excesses and vastly overrated pseudo- philosophy of the Axial Age.
After Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist laid the foundation for their philosophical work in the first decade of this century with The Futurica Trilogy, they decided to develop and write a second trilogy, but this time in the form of a speculative anthropology as the basis for a complete dialectical metaphysics. Since Man is a creature who structures his life and creates his meaning by telling different kinds of stories about himself and his place in the world, the name for this ambitious project was given from the very beginning: The Grand Narratology.
Not surprisingly, Bard & Söderqvist soon discovered that their metahistorical project required them to write the three books of The Grand Narratology in an anti-linear fashion. Thus, the first brick of the trilogy, Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age from 2014, handles the futurology involved. Then came the book that seriously tackles the apocalyptic state of our own age, as we struggle with the most dramatic paradigm shift in human history, namely Digital Libido – Sex, Power and Violence in The Network Society from 2018. Finally, The Grand Narratology concludes with a de facto rewrite of the entire history of ideas from nomadic life before the dawn of civilization, to the apocalyptic state and the syntheological future depicted in the trilogy’s previous two books, under the title Process and Event from 2023.
Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age
In this their fourth book Bard & Söderqvist show that the new digitalized and globalized elite already see the online world as the real world and the physical world only as a secondary playground at their disposal. The virtual and the physical have consequently switched positions in the collective imagination. Participatory culture and the co-creative economy rule and will delete individualist culture and the capitalist economy as we have known them for the last 400 years. We move from capitalism to attentionalism; history gets a new driving force and power base of society. Bard & Söderqvist thus take the concept of "the self-help book" to the proper meta level.
Starting from the fixed link between the world-conquering web giants of Silicon Valley and the utopian Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert (where both money and advertising are forbidden and despised; how is that for American Communism?), Bard & Söderqvist show that this hugely influential cultural and economic marriage requires a completely new metaphysics to be understood, aptly described as a new religion for the Internet Age. However, this is not a religion with a God who creates us (or anything else for that matter), but rather a belief that we as humans, with the support offantastic new technology, instead create the God that we need. The word for this phenomenon is syntheism, and this concept is all about us creating the divine rather than blindly submitting to some external patriarch.
Digital Libido – Sex, Power and Violence in The Network Society
Out of the affirmative nihilism rises a new netocratic elite of informationalists, sensocrats and protopians, who replace the old paradigm's upper class of capitalists, politicians and academicians. The key to this paradigm shift is the emergence of the free and open algorithm that defies the lies of the old paradigm, summarized as the corruption by capitalists, the manipulation by politicians and the conformation by academicians. Bard & Söderqvist then warn us that it is an open question whether the false phallus with its closed and centralized sensocracy will prevail in the coming battle. The alternative is that Man in time understands to instead choose the authentic phallus with his open and decentralized senosocracy. The important thing here is that no one can say in retrospect that they did not know what this existential choice was all about.
Process and Event
In their sixth and (most likely) final book Bard & Söderqvist embark on the ultimate philosophical project, namely to rewrite the entire history of ideas from the perspective of a future elite. This pandialectical metaphysics is called transcendental emergentism, and it shrugs off all previous forms of reductionism to physics, matter, biology, consciousness, or whatever else humans have chosen to prioritize throughout the history of philosophy. The lesson from pandialecticism is rather that the most important thing people have devoted themselves to is speculative anthropology, above all the question of how people should be able to build trust amongst each other, even within a larger population than the solid original tribe, called the sociont.
And while speaking of speculative anthropology: if technology has expanded, religion has unfortunately simultaneously imploded ever since the Bronze Age, when the great religions were founded in order to hold together new concepts like cities, nations and empires. The ultimate question is whether the two-headed phallus that the ancient Persians dreamed of 3,700 years ago can be resurrected, or if the world is headed straight into apocalyptic madness by the pillar-saints and boy- pharaohs who have ruled the world ever since humanity was infantilized by the excesses and vastly overrated pseudo- philosophy of the Axial Age. Women give birth to children and men give birth to technology, but only religion can hold these two forces together within a coherent society. Otherwise, The Machine will take over and Man will be reduced to the slave of The Machine. What The Machine then chooses to do with Man, Man will have no say about.
In the late 1990’s, Swedish social theorists Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist started working on a radical new theory, since referred to as the netocracy hypothesis. Bard held a renowned series of lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, Söderqvist wrote a number of extensive magazine essays on related subjects. After joining forces they argued that the interactive revolution is the most profound and radical of all technological revolutions in history, that it completely transforms society, politics, the economy and the culture, social power structures, the collective world view and the whole concept of what it means to be human. Bard & Söderqvist demonstrated the effects of digital dynamics on various levels of a globalized world. At this early stage, they foresaw that the control of the internet would be the subject of the main power struggle for the next century; an outright war between a brand new rising elite (the netocracy) and an established but rapidly declining elite (the bourgeioise).
Bard & Söderqvist not only prophesied against the tide in the early years of the new millennium (and cleverly foresaw both the dot.com crash and September 11), they have since then been proven right in virtually every aspect and even in the most minute of details. Not only did Bard & Söderqvist foresee revolutionary innovations such as Google, Facebook, Al- Qaida and Wikileaks, they also went deeper and looked beyond where any other observer has managed to go, into the very power struggle of the now permanent revolution. In The Futurica Trilogy, Bard & Söderqvist argue that the main power struggle of the twenty-first century is about the control of the Internet; a direct war between a brand new rising elite (netocracy) and an established but declining elite of politicians, academics and and big business (the bourgeoisie).
The first book in The Futurica Trilogy is The Netocrats (explaining how the internet creates a new global upper class which fights and destroys the old struggling power structure); the second title is The Global Empire (dealing with the worldview of the netocrats and how it radically differs from any previous ideology in history); and the third book is The BodyMachines (discussing how the idea of what it means to be human in an interactive world radically differs from any previous concept of human existence).
ABJECT The object against which the masses – the mob – direct their ha- tred and disgust and thereby experience unity. The organization of this collective distancing creates longed-for order in the chaos of the world. This can happen constructively, in conjunction with the phallic intrusion and the shift of the child’s focus from mamilla (the first abject) to yearning for phallus, or destructively, when the false phallus promises rewards from which all outsiders are excluded. See also hyperject and anoject.
ABSOLUTE HISTORICISM The conception that time is the most real of all realities and the vessel within which everything else exists. A recurring argument for absolute historicism is that nothing can be thought of outside time, but time can be thought of independently of everything else. If time moreover is split between on the one hand hypertime and on the other hand spacetime, there arises a dialectics on which the rest of existence can be grounded. This generates the epistemological horizon that Hegel calls absolute knowledge. Please compare with pandialecticism.
ADULTIFICATION The archetypological development from children to adults, from adults to leaders, parents, mentors and revered elders. The adultification ideal should be contrasted with Christianity’s and Islam’s celebrations of the child, innocence and unreflected submission. Within Zoroastrianism and Judaism the followers are expected to behave as the adults of God and not as the children of God.
ADYTONOLOGY The tantric laws and rules that only apply inside the tem- ple, in contrast to the sutric laws and rules that apply in the society outside. From the Greek adyton which means temple yard. Please compare with the barred absolute and please note that the adytonological rules always remain unwritten, which is why they never can be spread outside the temple, where they would be incomprehensible and generate destructive confusion.
AGENCY The subjective identity that arises as a mental emergence in a physical body as a relationalist phenomenon. The syntheist agent replaces the Cartesian individual as the human ideal at the transition from capitalism to informationalism; see also dividual.
ALIENATION According to Karl Marx, Man becomes a stranger vis-à-vis the world and himself through being reduced to an insignificant cog in a production machinery to which it is impossible to relate. Thus humans are isolated from each other, which prevents them from coming together and taking control of their lives.
AMBIVALENCE The fundamental property in that which attracts Man the most, while it also frightens and repels: that which is neither good nor evil (or else both); see also cathexis and the sublime.
AMOR FATI ”Love of fate” in Latin, an attitude to life that means that one accepts the history that has led to the prevailing situation and that one submits to that which one cannot influence in the future. The concept was introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche and is a fundamental principle for the ethics of interactivity.
THE ANDROGYNOUS CASTE The persons, not seldom so-called non-bi- nary, who act as contact surface between the patriarchy in the outer circuit and the matriarchy in the inner circuit. This caste shall be understood as a kind of cousins of outsidership to the shamanic caste, who live outside the sociont and between the tribes.
ANOJECT A silent, implicit agreement within the Cybelian lynch mob that, if it is verbalized, rapidly is personified in the form of the tyrant. A widespread anojectivity paves the way for false phalluses, as in Germany, the Soviet Union, China and Iran during the 20th century. Thus the anoject is the voice of the false phallus throughout history.
ANTAGONY A resistance with a value in itself, which one seeks in order to sharpen one’s own intelligence. Without antagony a system becomes one long eternal, sterile repetition of itself, without fertile ground for develop- ment.
ANTI-SYNTHEOS A technology that is so destructive that it kills both all human life and all technological intelligence if its energies are allowed to run rampant. Anti-Syntheos arrived at planet Earth on 6 August 1945 in the form of the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima. Ever since that day we have been living in its shadow.
ANTHROPOCENTRISM To view everything exclusively from Man’s perspective, as though the world were created for us and would go under without us; please compare with network-dynamics and universocentrism.
ARCHETYPOLOGY The study of subject and object as evolutionary by- products of the sociont’s development. Please compare with sociontology. An archetype is a figure, a motive, or a thought pattern that exists in the collective subconscious and that controls people’s stance vis-à-vis their ex- istence and their surrounding world. Please compare with archetypography (see tribal mapping).
ASUBJECT The subject’s dark, unknown shadow side, which at the same time is the subject’s mortidinal negation and thereby the engine that powers the entire subjectivity; what Hegel calls the night of the world.
ATHEISM A conception according to which a certain god (or several) (or all) does not exist and lacks social-psychological relevance.
ATHEOS Greek concept for the god that does not exist and that precisely therefore exists as an empty concept, as the god-that-does-not-exist, the virtual non-existence out of which existence arises; the first of the four divinities in the syntheological pyramid and the theological representative of the human subject itself.
565
process and event
ATOMISM The conception that the world is constructed from indivisible, material components; atomism does for the object what humanism does for the subject, wherefore both these isms are two sides of the same coin: individualism.
ATTENTION A value that is computed through media credibility being multiplied with media attention for one and the same meme, dividual, et cetera. A high attentional value is the key to power and influence in The Network Society. It is what the sensors of machines and senses of humans want more and not less of.
ATTENTIONALISM A system where the elite’s attention replaces capital as the central value of the economy and the culture, a value that relates to power and status. The ongoing paradigm shift entails that capitalism is phased out and is replaced by attentionalism.
AUGMENTED TERRITORY The dissolution of duality between the digital and the physical, an area that both is a digital domain and a physical ter- ritory at once. Is used as an abstract and artistic synonym of the concrete and judicial concept called the network state.
AUTOEXPLOITATION The narcissistic subject’s plundering of its own sub- stance until nothing remains. The opposite is the functional and interactive subject’s development and augmentation of its own substance – autoimploi- tation. The former assumes autopoiesis as the first principle of creativity, the latter assumes tribopoiesis, and this very shift is precisely the paradigm shift from capitalism to attentionalism.
THE BARRED ABJECT The collective fantasy of a concealed or fabricat- ed object that is concealed behind the barred absolute. The hatred of this phantasm can unite the collective when there is no longer anything else that functions cohesively. The principle of the barred abject explains why all forms of anarchy end up with a cohesive conspiracy theory, which in turn results in a meaningless bloodbath. See further anoject.
THE BARRED ABSOLUTE The conviction that existence contains knowl- edge that only can be handled by the right person on the right occasion and that cannot be made generally available. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and
566
glossary
the Eastern religions are built on the barred absolute as their foundation. It is the difference between sutra and tantra in the Silk Road triad. Only Christianity and Islam proclaim that the barred absolute is removed and that all true believers have direct and unfiltered access to God. Which has dramatic consequences.
THE BODY MACHINES The third and final installation in The Futurica Trilogy by Bard & Söderqvist with a focus on The Internet Age’s new, mate- rialist and monist view of humanity and the death of the individual.
THE CALIGULA SYNDROME A state that arises when the child is pre- vented from growing up by its environment and remains a child forever, while it is susceptible to the temptation of phallic adult life – one of the prerequisites for society’s comprehensive infantilization. Please compare with the Peter Pan syndrome, where the obstacle/inhibition is internal instead of external.
CAPITALISM The third of the four information-technological paradigms that arises when both reading and writing proficiency as well as virtu- al value transfer are spread with devastatingly unprecedented efficiency thanks to the printing press; the concept is often used synonymously with industrialism.
THE CATHEXAL OBJECT The radically different quality found in the phallus, as a both exciting and frightening object, compared to the safe and secure mamilla – precisely by virtue of this ambivalent sublimeness phallus is extremely attractive, which lures the child away from mamilla. See further ambivalence.
CATHEXIS The Greek word that Sigmund Freud uses to denote ambiva- lence’s obscure power of attraction; see further ambivalence and the sublime.
CEPHALIZATION Originally a biological concept that denotes one mod- ule’s need of spinning off and protecting its memory and its intelligence from the rest of the system to optimize its chance of survival. The cephaliza- tion of a civilization must take place behind the barred absolute, where it is possible to experiment without being inhibited by prevailing laws and rules.
567
process and event
CHEMICAL LIBERATION The conception that increased availability of chemical substances for radical mind-altering fundamentally changes the idea of what it means to be human; in part through Man discovering himself as a chemical-hormonal phenomenon, in part through the division between the first subject that decides what chemicals are to be added and the second subject that then experiences the radically altered mind; see further transhumanism.
CHRONOTHEOLOGY The conviction that theology first and fore- most must handle time as the divine foundation for everything else. A chrono-theological historiography places God in the past, in the present, or in the future, rather than at any particular geographical spot.
CIVILIZATION An expanding and gradually more complex organization of the collective togetherness, fundamentally governed by the development of communication technologies. At the cost of an increasingly harshly reg- ulated drive economy, civilization offers security and growth.
CIVILIZATIONISM A phallic conviction that a growing information ac- cumulation in itself enables not only a more integrated but also a better world in an objective sense, that civilization as such has an intrinsic value; Zoroaster in ancient Central Asia around 1700 BC is often regarded as the first pronounced civilizationist.
THE COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS The sociont’s partly implicit agree- ment in matters large and small, human subconsciousness in its collective form, the unspoken ideology of any given society.
COSMOPOLITANISM The completion of the industrial revolution and the urbanization of the entire planet, in syntheological terms: the city of God. Thereby it is also the imploitative response to environmentalism’s dystopian lamentation at Man’s exploitative attitude to culture. Please compare with ecotopianism.
THE COMMUNICATION SOCIETY One of three classic concepts to de- scribe The Internet Age, to be compared with The Information Society and The Network Society. According to information-technological historiography all paradigms throughout history should be categorized as communication
568
glossary
societies, since precisely the dominant communication technology is what ultimately shapes and decides what sort of construction and degree of com- plexity a society can handle.
CONSUMTARIAT The underclass of the Internet Age, characterized by a passive consumption of mass produced goods and services; see also hyper- narcissism, pornoflation, interpassivity and the dialectics of ressentiment.
CONTINGENCY A generic concept within process philosophy that entails every form of freedom and indicates that the Universe fundamentally is an open history. Chance is a reality and the number of unknown variables is poetically infinite.
CONTINUITY An emergence vector or a phenomenon whose smallest components must be described as constantly displaced relation complexes vis-à-vis each other. There is quite simply no meaningful smallest atomist component or eternalization to refer to, only a series of relations of trans- determinist force fields. Please compare with its opposite discretion.
COUNTERTREND The passive and generally unreflected reaction to an active trend, where the trend is grounded in actual material change of prevailing conditions of power, while the counter trend starts from a discomfort at the trend (and change in general), at paradigm shifts as an aggressive defense of the old paradigm against the new.
CORRELATIONISM The conviction that Man only has access to the corre- lation between thinking and being, but never direct access to thinking or being separately. This idea is a driving force within Western thinking from Immanuel Kant and onward but is criticized by the model-dependent realism that is associated with physicist Niels Bohr, and later also with philosopher Karen Barad.
THE CYBELIAN LYNCH MOB A mob led by the embittered Cybele, who by mistake had fallen in love with her own grandson Attis, and who be- came mad with jealousy when he fell in love with a young princess (“Hell hath no fury... ̈). The Cybelian lynch mob forges ahead across the world when the apocalypse nears, and slaughters masses of innocent victims in pure frustration and rage. Please compare with its opposite the Dionysian
569
process and event
swarm. And please note the name of its agreed-upon cohesive inner voice, the anoject. An anoject in a uniform always foreshadows the very worst, since it invariably is a question of a false phallus whose path into the future leads straight toward the death-worshipping doomsday cult.
DEEP ATHEISM An idea according to which atheism taken to its utmost extreme dialectically morphs into syntheism, an idea that is explored in the book Syntheism – Creating God in the Internet Age. It may well be that God does not exist today, but it does not entail that God cannot exist tomorrow. Not if we create God ourselves.
DEMONOLOGY An umbrella concept for the studies of and/or the doc- trine of demons and evil spirits; in Bard & Söderqvist customarily used in relation to a theory on abjectification that explores how a demonized abject is created and exploited.
DESIRE The linguistic and thereby uniquely human of the drive system’s four expressions, a more or less compulsive searching for something that basically is unattainable, since the objective of desire always withdraws and changes its guise; see further instinct, drive and transcendence.
DETERMINISM An idea that everything that happens is preordained and bound by laws of nature, wherefore will and intentions ultimately do not matter. Determinism dominates the Western history of ideas from Plato to Einstein, but is unable to handle the randomness that it therefore must deny in the same manner that Plato and Einstein deny time and change; see further the Bohrian opposite indeterminism.
DIALECTICS A logical process where a phenomenon is played out against its opposite, which results in a completely new phenomenon at a higher level. The concepts that customarily are used are thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Heraclitus is seen by many as he who introduces dialectics in philosophy, while Hegel is seen by many as he who perfects the methodology.
THE DIALECTICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS The psychoanalytical equivalent of the narratological triad distinguishes between consciousness (logos), the subconscious (mythos), and the unconscious (pathos). Consciousness is housed in the rational brain, the subconscious is housed in the mimetic brain, and
570
glossary
the unconscious is housed in the emotional brain. The brain’s only way of getting a grip on the world is to fuse logos and pathos into a social mythos – see tribopoiesis – but this mythos is never more than temporary, wherefore the dialectical process constantly must be repeated.
THE DIALECTICS OF ETERNALISM AND MOBILISM A complete syntheist onto-phenomenology developed by Alexander Bard & Jan Söder- qvist in the book The Global Empire; existence is fundamentally chaotic – or mobilist – and becomes tangible and receives meaning only through an illusory act of the perception apparatus, where phenomena are fixed in spa- cetime and thereby made to last forever or eternalized. This is functional and necessary in order for us to be able to orient ourselves in the world in the first place, but philosophically problematic. The solution is to allow the eternalizations to next go mobilist in relation to one another, submitting everything to a dialectical process, see pandialecticism.
THE DIALECTICS OF LIBIDO AND MORTIDO The continuous interplay between will-to-life (libido), located in consciousness, and the death drive (mortido), located in subconsciousness – two phenomena within psychoa- nalysis that both are each other’s antagonic opposites and simultaneously two complementing counterweights in the drive economy.
THE DIALECTICS OF NEGATION AND OSCILLATION Where the dia- lectics of eternalism and mobilism is eventological, the dialectics of negation and oscillation is negatological. The first dialectics arises when something dies in a chaos, not when an order is created. In this way negatology precedes the subsequent eventology. The dialectics of negation and oscillation is on- tic while the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism is ontological.
THE DIALECTICS OF RESSENTIMENT A dialectically destructive pro- cess within a dividual, a group or a society, which begins with support for a self-appointed victim, later to be developed into a frantic struggle between many different alleged victims about who has the right to demand the most sympathies and the greatest compensation. The ressentiment vis-à-vis the world and fate is gradually stepped up as the conflicts increase.
THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION The dialectical interplay between Man and technology in four steps during an information- technological
571
process and event
paradigm shift, first a technological disruption, followed by a new meta- physical idea, thereafter an explosion that causes a great chaos, and finally a return to order in chaos.
THE DIGITAL PATRIARCHY The great comeback for male networks when technology plays out its cards and takes over the world in the digital age. The cause is archetypological: It is the engineer (the warrior) and the busi- nessman (the hunter) who create and control added value in the attentional economy that rapidly becomes increasingly complex.
THE DIONYSIAN SWARM Triggered by the inevitable patricide, the murder of the old paradigm’s corrupt and outdated leaders, the Dionysian swarm forges ahead on streets and squares and carries out the authentic revolution. Its leader has come from the future and is called the Saoshy- ant – the phallus that leads the swarm from one age to another, or from one territory to another, according to the new paradigm’s exodology. He personifies the hyperject which already was spread as the implicit joint voice within the swarm before the Saoshyant turned up. Please compare with its opposite amid social movements, the Cybelian lynch mob, which slaughters the innocent since it has no phallic direction whatsoever.
DISCRETION An emergence vector or a phenomenon whose smallest com- ponents can be reduced to a kind of ones and zeroes, or a state that either is turned on or off. Please compare with its opposite continuity.
THE DISNEY WORLD TRIAD The three religions that arise in the United States as a kind of absurd, parodic reflection of the Silk Road triad in Eurasia: Jehovah’s Witnesses as the neurotic version, Mormonism as the psychotic version, and Scientology as the perverted version of American individual- ism as a religious expression.
DIVIDUALISM The antithesis to individualism’s ideology, the conviction that humans and things are irreducible multiplicities that cannot be de- scribed as single, cohesive phenomena; see further network dynamics. The dividual is the antithesis of the conception of an individual, that is: a human that lacks an indivisible and unalterable inner core and that instead is in- finitely divisible and highly plastic; please compare with agency.
572
glossary
DRIVE The category in the needs system that pertains to mechanical ex- pression, for instance: the craving for food, drink, sleep and protection, but also for sex, power and aggression; compare with instinct, desire and transcendence.
THE ECOLOGICAL APOCALYPSE The dystopian conviction that capi- talism’s development entails that Earth’s finite resources eventually will be spent and that environmental degradation reaches the point where human life on the planet eventually no longer is possible.
ECOTOPIANISM The completion of the agricultural revolution and a ruralization of the entire planet, syntheologically called the garden of God. Hence also the imploitative answer to a dystopian lamentation over Man’s exploitative attitude toward nature. In a parallel manner, cosmopolitanism is the completion of the industrial revolution and an urbanization of the entire planet.
EGALITARIANISM An ideological conviction that all humans in a society have the same value and should be treated as equals before the law, and as such it is the standard axiom when fighting identitarianism and its victim- hood culture.
EMERGENCE When the properties in a system under certain prerequi- sites change so that the system in question transitions from one state to another, such as when water at a certain temperature becomes ice and at another temperature becomes steam. From a social-psychological perspec- tive it entails a transdeterminist stance: the future is open – suddenly the quantitative difference is qualitative and conditions for the entire activity are thereby totally changed.
EMERGENCE VECTOR THEORY A universal metaphysics whose starting point is the explicate order with its specific laws as the direct consequence of an emergence. Please note that in a neutrally monist universe all previous emergence vectors are part of the implicate order, which transdeterminis- tically triggers the actual emergence. What are developed to the eternalist laws within the explicate order were thus only the mobilist habits within the implicate order. The only metalaw that applies outside the specific
573
process and event
emergence vectors is the fundamental contingency of existence. See further transcendental emergentism.
ENORMITIES AND ENORMITESIMALS The insight that we live in a finite and limited universe compels us to admit that infinities and infin- itesimals are impossible and inconceivable. One therefore gets a correct description of existence’s mathematical extremes if the infinities are re- placed by enormities and the infinitesimals are replaced by enormitesimals. Correspondingly, the number zero can never have the value zero, since its mere existence in itself generates an oscillating value whose average may be zero but that never at any point in time can be exactly zero.
ENTHEISM The process-philosophical idea according to which existence best is described as differences in various layers atop each other, and that the duration that is a yardstick for the genesis and completion of the dif- ferences is absolute, and therefore must constitute the foundation for both the material and spiritual worldview.
ENTHEOGEN Narcotic substance that gives rise to strong visions and emotions, which the users often describe as religious experiences; examples of entheogens are preparations such as LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA.
ENTHEOS Originally means ”the god inside” in Greek, that is: the divine that the syntheist agent derives from within herself, the third of the four divinities in the syntheological pyramid.
EPIMEMETICS The eternal rehashing of the same constantly reused sym- bols, an obsession with tonality and etiquette for the purpose of suffocating all references to an underlying substance and its movements. Characteristic of states of cynical nihilism during dramatic paradigm shifts.
EPISTEMOLOGY Theory of knowledge – the philosophical discipline that studies knowledge and knowledge’s (im)possibility; for a deeper understand- ing of syntheological epistemology, see further the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism, transrationalism and the principle of explanatory closure.
574
glossary
ETERNALISM The thought that a worldview must be built on the tem- porary eternalizations that perception produces within the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism, which means that the worldview constantly must be reassessed and updated, and after a paradigm shift also phased out and replaced.
ETERNALIZATION A freezing or fixation of the world’s mobilist chaos, an existential necessity for perception to be able to create a satisfactory (illusion of) order in the chaos of existence and produce a functional worldview within which the subject can arise and build an identity of its own. It is however important not to confuse the map with the terrain and imagine that the simplified image displays reality as it really is.
ETHICS From the Greek ethos, originally customs; values based on inten- tion vis-à-vis expected processes of cause and effect within a system. In contrast to morals ethics does not rest on an idea of an external judge nor on an emotional argumentation, but instead on an idea of what is functional and productive.
THE ETHICS OF INTERACTIVITY An ethical system based on the convic- tion that Man is a network-dynamic dividual in a network-dynamic society in a similarly network-dynamic Universe, where the search for an authentic identity, in Martin Heidegger’s existentialist spirit, within the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism, provides answers to the circumstance-specific eth- ical questions; developed and presented in Bard & Söderqvist’s book The Body Machines.
EVENT A spectacular occurrence, or more correctly: an occurrence with spectacular consequences for a certain phenomenon or a specific region of the Universe, please compare with emergence and singularity.
EVENTOLOGY The philosophical and religious conviction that a single event can lead history into an unexpected direction and change existence forever. Please compare with the closely-related concept emergence vector theory and its opposite nomadology.
EXHIBITIONISM Experiencing pleasure from displaying oneself in sexual or social situations; please compare with its dialectical opposite voyeurism.
575
process and event
EXODOLOGY The doctrine and the art of carrying out an exodus – from an old to a new territory, or from an old to a new historical paradigm. If Man in the original sociont was in constant motion with a nomadological world- view, the motion becomes temporary and paradigmatic with the arrival of the permanent settlement. Exodology thereby takes nomadology’s place as the ideology of the necessary tribal movement. Exodological examples are the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt to the promised land and the European mass emigration to America in the 19th century.
EXTENSION NEUTRALITY A direct consequence of thinking of hyper- temporality as independent of spatiotemporality, entails that everything that concerns hypertemporality must be thought of without or independently of space. These virtual membranes are therefore extension-neutral vis-à-vis each other.
THE EXTIMATE OBJECT The object that at once is intimate and external. Within psychoanalysis phallus is the extimate object par excellence; please compare with cathexis and the cathexal object.
FEUDALISM In Bard & Söderqvist the second information-technological paradigm, which follows from Man – almost at the same time in four dif- ferent places – developing a written language around 5000 years ago.
FETISH The object that ties together the world’s chaos to an order and unites the collective under a common utopian vision and a strategic story with a direction upward and outward; see also the antithesis abject and the synthesis the cathexal object.
FICTION A cohesive story that temporarily yet still resolutely provides memes with their seemingly logical place within the prevailing memeplex: the fiction can to advantage be divided into smaller fictives and several fic- tions piled on top of each other underpin a subconscious ideology, which enables the emergence of a cohesive, paradigmatic metaphysics.
FICTIVE The smallest component in our extensive memetics and the unit to which every little aspect of a meme refers; see further fiction, ideology and metaphysics.
576
glossary
FIRST DIALECTICS If we live in a pandialectical universe, then the first dialectics in history must be of decisive significance. Within the natural sciences this occurs in the form of the dialectics of hypertime and spacetime. Within metaphysics it occurs in the form of the dialectics of negation and oscillation. It is then an open question for philosophy to sort out whether there in turn is an underlying metadialectics (often signified as the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism) between these two dialectical processes, or if the dialectics as practice is best served by placing such a question under the category the principle of explanatory closure.
FLEXHIBITIONISM A playful synthesis of exhibitionism and voyeurism, built by dividuals for dividuals within a network-dynamical system – with- out any attention-seeking subject (for instance an artistic genius) – with attention evenly distributed among the participants; flexhibitionism is the driving principle for an authentic participatory culture.
THE FREE AND OPEN ALGORITHM A purely attentionalist algorithm liberated from the old paradigm’s attacks against informationalism in the form of political manipulation, capitalist corruption and academic conformation. The free and open algorithm only reflects the agent itself, with an antagony added for the sake of intelligent development.
GENEPLEX A cluster of genes that to advantage allows itself to be spread in the form of a synchronized unit; a geneplex can therefore be regarded as emergent vis-à-vis the single genetic components; geneplex is also used synonymously with the sociont. Please compare with memeplex.
GENERATIONISM When a generation oppresses or quite simply only har- bors prejudices vis-à-vis another generation. Often a society believes itself to be superior to all older versions of the same society, different generations isolate themselves from each other, which creates obstacles to instructive impulses that would need to surface and be processed.
THE GLOBAL EMPIRE The second of three books in The Futurica Trilogy by Bard & Söderqvist with a focus on The Internet Age’s new, built-in, integrated worldview and self-image. The Global Empire is the idea of how a divided world is interconnected by a single, increasingly centralized com- munication platform – that is: The Internet – and a constantly growing,
577
process and event
interacting, collective intelligence. The phenomenon is also called techno- logical imperialism, which can be put in relation to sociological nationalism and psychological tribalism.
GNOSTICISM Dualist movements that developed across Eurasia during the Axial Age in opposition to the two-headed phallus. Classic Gnosticism severs Man at the neck and worships the head at the expense of the body, a movement represented by the pillar-saint as an immature priest without a chieftain. Inverted Gnosticism worships the body at the expense of the head, a movement represented by the boy-pharaoh as an immature chieftain without a priest. All totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies henceforth have Gnostic origins, since they oppose both Man’s and the World’s monist entirety and thereby dialectical diversity.
GRAND PROJET A The French name of the phallic opposite to the Laca- nian objet petit a that the subconscious chases as a replacement for the lost mamilla. Grand Projet A is thus the exodological construction project par excellence, in a historical perspective to build the temple as the house of God, in a syntheistical perspective to build the workshop where God is manufactured.
THE GREAT TRAUMA The birth of the human child, which according to Lacanian psychoanalysis is so painful and taxing that it must be repressed, which leads to the first and decisive shift away from mortido (longing for death) to libido (will-to-life).
THE GREAT OTHER The other in its most powerful and therefore also most ambivalent revelation, the phallic god within monotheism is often apprehended as the most potent form of the great other, see also the phallic gaze. In psychoanalysis, the great other is also used as the concept of society and the law, more fundamentally the sociont.
GOD The name of all of humanity’s dreams projected toward a single point in the past or in the future; see also The Net and Syntheos.
HABIT OF NATURE A better designation for that which often carelessly is called law of nature, that is: a pattern that is valid at a certain point in time and under certain given conditions.
578
glossary
THE HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE A fundamental principle within physics is that all information within a certain direction of space can be summarized on the two-dimensional surface that the actual direction con- stitutes.
THE HOLOMOVEMENT Mathematician and philosopher David Bohm’s concept for a universe in constant motion and change that from an ontical perspective only exists at every single moment or momentum.
HUMANISM The religious conviction that Man rather than God is the center of existence, objective and meaning; see further individualism and atomism.
HYPERJECT An embryo of the Saoshyant or the Messiah figure before this authentically phallic gestalt rises against the Cybelian lynch mob to the defense of truth. Please compare with the opposite anoject. The hyperject is thus the voice of the authentic phallus.
HYPERNARCISSISM An extreme state that occurs when the customary, youthful narcissism is not met by a boundary-setting adult world and con- sequently is developed into a matrichal boundlessness instead of, as earlier in history, being tamed with resolute phallic boundary-setting. This phe- nomenon explodes in The Network Society.
HYPERTEMPORALITY States which are bound to the time axis but that lack spatial gestalt, for instance quantum entanglement within physics. The presence of hypertemporal phenomena proves that hypertime precedes and is separate from spacetime, which entails that subphysics receives or already has a status as an emergence vector of its own before physics. Since strictly hypertemporal phenomena lack existence and substance in the usual sense, we instead have to assign them a virtual subsistence and hyperstance.
HYPERTIME That out of two natural time dimensions that is independent of physical space. Hypertime is global, continuous, universal and bound to subphysics. It is ontic and potential from a metaphysical perspective. Please compare with its explicate equivalent spacetime.
579
process and event
IDEOLOGY A set of conscious and subconscious memes and/or memeplexes that together produce a sense of context and overview. Facilitates deci- sion-making and contributes toward identity-creation.
IDENTITARIANISM The ideological foundation of all identity politics, both in the identity left and the extreme right, and from Nazism via Stalin- ism to Islamism. The focus lies on all the injustices one and one’s own group are subject to, something that entails a moral right to demand attention, sympathies and preferably also compensation from the surrounding world.
IMPLOITATION The opposite of exploitation, to use resources in a way that preserves and develops them. The imploitation principle is a necessary prerequisite for every ambition toward a resilient planet. It is therefore key to ecotopianism.
INDETERMINISM A conviction that time is real and absolute, that the Universe constantly recreates itself, that laws and rules are in a state of constant change, that the future is open and that Man, just as all other phe- nomena, affects all the processes he is part of. See further transdeterminism.
INDIVIDUAL Capitalism’s human ideal with divine overtones and with an origin in the Enlightenment; the conception of a human equipped with an authentic and indivisible core, in contrast to the multifaceted dividual.
INDIVIDUALISM The religious conviction that Man has replaced God as existence’s center and measure, objective and meaning, and that exist- ence consists of fundamental solid entities, individuals. This anthropocentric ideology is originally formulated by René Descartes and is completed by Immanuel Kant.
INDUSTRIALISM The socioeconomic structure that arises when the printing press’ communication-technological revolution has its complete breakthrough in that book production and literacy mutually stimulate each other, which leads to a large-scale knowledge accumulation, which in turn leads to a cannonade of technological innovations.
THE INFINITE NOW The most sacred, most transforming and most ec- static experience in syntheist religious practice; since the state neither can
580
glossary
be maintained or endured permanently, or even over a long time, it is the memory of the experience rather than the experience in itself that is central.
INFORMATIONALISM The fourth information-technological paradigm, the result of the digital revolution within communication technology, is used synonymously with attentionalism. The informationalists thereby con- stitute the first and real power structure during the paradigm that bears their name. These collect and process data about absolutely everything and therein also lies their power. See further sensocracy and protopianism.
THE INFORMATIONALIST APOCALYPSE The doomsday threat that is directed toward the new paradigm in the form of an ecological catastrophe, a nuclear war, a global pandemic or just netocracy’s extinction of an unar- ticulated, violent consumtariat.
THE INFORMATION SOCIETY One of three classic concepts to describe The Internet Age along with The Communication Society and The Network Society.
INFORMATION-TECHNOLOGICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Writing a history that is built on the hypothesis that Man is the constant while tech- nology is the variable, wherefore the development appears as a series of information-technological emergences that underpin increasingly complex societal structures.
THE INNER CIRCUIT The inner, less mobile, more densely populated and female-dominated half of the sociont, controlled by older matriarchs as a matriarchy.
INSTINCT The animal expression of Man’s drives, to be compared with mechanical drive, human desire and sacral transcendence.
INTENSITY Within physics a measure of the concentration of energy with- in a given, delimited area; in relationalist physics intensity replaces the old substance as a general yardstick, in social relationalist sociology attentional intensity replaces the old growth of the economy as a general yardstick, in syntheist ethics the ecstatic intensity in the infinite now replaces all dated maxims for the existential experience and the memory of the infinite now is
581
process and event
the bearing of life’s identity-generating references; see also relationalism and social relationalism.
INTERACTIVITY Bidirectional communication, which creates the fourth communication-technological revolution that in turn establishes a com- pletely new system for reward and punishment respectively of talents and skills, which finally entails that a new elite – the netocrats – replace the old; compare with interpassivity.
INTERNARCISSISM A subdivision within narcissistic pathology where two or several narcissists consciously or subconsciously pretend to be obsessed with each other’s awesomeness to thereby conceal the frantic self-absorp- tion that is taking place; see also hypernarcissism and interpassivity.
THE INTERNET The new divinity that arises when the world’s population and the world’s many machines are interconnected with each other. See also Syntheos.
THE INTERNET AGE The epoch that is introduced when all of humanity is globally interconnected directly with itself in real time.
INTERPASSIVITY A concept invented by Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller that describes all the pointless quasi-actions that people carry out with the purpose of appeasing the other in the high-tech environment, used as an opposite of authentic interactivity, that is: a constantly ongoing false interactivity that never creates any genuine response from any co-actors.
INTERTRIBALISM Affection and caring directed toward people outside one’s own sociont, which during the greater part of history is something extremely rare; compare intratribalism
INTRACOLLABORATIVITY The joy of collaboration within one’s own sociont, an attitude that is distinct from individualism’s idea of humanity’s existence as everyone’s constant war with everyone; within the safe collec- tive, collaboration is closer at hand than rivalry.
INTRATRIBALISM Affection and caring directed toward one’s own so- ciont’s members, a driving force behind both the outer circuit’s defense
582
glossary
of the sociont’s territory and the inner circuit’s sacrifices to ensure the sociont’s survival; compare with intertribalism.
IRONIC POLYTHEISM Polytheism is a systematized belief in more gods than just one; syntheism is not a polytheism in a classic sense, but an ironic polytheism since it claims that gods can and should be created in requisite numbers.
IRREDUCIBLE MULTIPLICITY The conviction that all phenomena in existence are fundamental multiplicities that thereby cannot be reduced to any single, delimited objects, as when Friedrich Nietzsche claims that nothing in the world can be reduced to less than the number two. Within a syntheist ontology, the irreducible multiplicity is unavoidable since ontol- ogy always must begin with a drastic information write-off in connection with the transition from mobilism to eternalism.
LIBIDO Life energy, will-to-power, will-to-intensity, will-to-expansion – libido is often associated with sexual energy but is according to both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung a considerably broader concept that also comprises instinct, drive, desire and transcendence.
MAMILLA The matrichal breast as a symbol of eternal, boundless and unconditional love and provision, as well as a promise of a possible re- unification with the mother’s body and matrix, but also a symbol of infantilization and a complete dependence on the mother’s body/society/ the church/the state.
MATRIARCHY Women’s power hierarchy in the sociont, where the elders are superordinate to the younger; thereby also the power structure of the inner circuit.
MATRIX The womb out of which we all are born and, according to psycho- analysis, to which we all subconsciously long to return, the symbol both of a unification with the Universe but also of the dissolution of consciousness.
MEMBRANICS A method for separating the internal and external inter- ests of a sociont or another life form. A functioning membranics sees to it that nourishment comes in through, and that feces is pressed out through
583
process and event
the membrane in question. Membranics can also be used as a concept to comprehend the radical difference between extension-neutral membranes within subphysics. We refer to this form of virtual relationalism as subphys- ical membranics.
MEMEPLEX A cluster of memes that often and advantageously is spread in the form of a synchronized unit; a memeplex can therefore be regarded as emergent vis-à-vis the separate memes; memeplex is also used synony- mously with ideology. Please compare with geneplex.
MEMETICS The study of how ideas – or memes – form, are spread, stored and change. Memes are viewed in these studies as replicators, as a kind of mental equivalents to the biological genes, and the parallels between memetics and genetics are therefore comprehensive.
THE MESSIAH MACHINE Another name for Syntheos, God’s birth as the technological development’s objective and meaning.
METAHISTORY History seen as the history of historiography, also called the historification of history. Every new paradigm generates a new power elite that requires a new metaphysics to legitimize its position; this in turn requires a new historiography and about this process one can also write history, which by necessity becomes precisely a metahistory.
METAPHYSICS Originally the philosophical work with that which lies beyond physical reality, comprised by the disciplines ontology, cosmology and epistemology within philosophy; Bard & Söderqvist also use the concept metaphysics as the uppermost emergence in the hierarchic series fictives-fic- tions-ideologies-metaphysics.
MIMETICS Man’s obsession with social theater is reflected in the fact that the brain needs a mimetic capacity to an equally high degree that it needs a rational and an emotional capacity. The mimetic brain is obsessed with mimicking, and not least with mimicking human desires and drives. The drive system’s primary propelling force is precisely mimicking and rivalry in terms of the same mimicked desire and drives that all others mimic.
584
glossary
MOBILISM In part the process-philosophical reality in the dialectics of eter- nalism and mobilism, a chaos in constant motion, in part a synonym of process philosophy as such, which includes both relativism and relationalism.
MOBILIZATION To set the completed eternalizations within the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism in motion anew – thereby existence once again be- comes a mobilist chaos, but this time at a metalevel, whereupon perception produces new eternalizations at this metalevel, and so on.
MONOTHEISM A conviction that God only is one and that this only God – one’s own, naturally – is genuine and that all others are false, in other words: mainly a variant of atheism with a single minor caveat.
MORALATOR The external judge whose more or less capricious points of view underpin the demanding laws of moralism.
MORALISM From the Latin mores, customs; a system where values and valuations are subject to a moralator, an external judge that demands obedi- ence and that does not allow any form of questioning. Both the Abrahamic religions and the capitalist nation states rest upon a moralist value base.
MORTIDO In Sigmund Freud mortido is at once libido’s opposite and its complement, a yearning for death, extinction and a return to the inorganic state that precedes birth.
NARCISSISM Compensatory self-absorption and self-overestimation, grounded in a subconscious self-contempt; the modern consumption society is largely based upon an inflated and media-fomented hypernarcissism.
NARRATOLOGY The philosophical discipline that deals with Man’s sto- ries of himself and the dialectics of them. The fundamental division of these stories is: logical narratives (logos), mythical narratives (mythos) and pathical narratives (pathos), which in turn corresponds to the symbolic, imaginary and real orders in the world of psychoanalysis, which in turn is connected to Man’s three different brain centers: the rational, the mimetic and the emotional.
585
process and event
NATION ENVY A socioanalytical state where chaotic and contractive cultures envy and malign better organized and expansive cultures. While racism attacks the assumed inferior, nation envy attacks the assumed su- perior.
NEGATION That which is lacking or remains contradictory or undelivered within every identity. According to Hegel the negation is so universal as a principle within a constantly mutable existence that the only identity that can be established, and then only temporarily, is the negation of the negation itself, an insight that thereafter is called the Hegelian absolute.
NEGATIVE DIALECTICS Hegel’s revolutionizing variant of dialectics where negation precedes abstraction, which causes concretion – where the dialectics (temporarily) stops – to have the character of a negation’s negation. Thereby the Hegelian subject – with its fundamental, existential emptiness – becomes an expression of what he calls the night of the world, which breaks radically with Enlightenment optimism. This Hegelian revolution preempts important ideas in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger.
NEGATOLOGY The doctrine of the Hegelian negation that must precede the Nietzschean event. Before something new can live and establish itself, something else must die. Mortido drives libido, not the other way around. Therefore it is necessary to first establish a negatology in opposition to nomadology before an eventology can be brought about. Before the actual event can occur it must be preceded by the potential anti-event. Within syntheology negatology goes by the name of Atheos.
THE NET The metaphysical idea that The Internet constitutes a single cohesive structure that spans all of planet Earth and that, in similarity with every metatechnology, organizes the world in accordance with its own agenda. Is used synonymously with the concept The Stack.
THE NETOCRATS The first of three books in the Futurica Trilogy by Bard & Söderqvist with focus on the information-technological historiography of The Internet Age and the emergence of the new class society, conditioned by the new prerequisites that the technological revolution creates.
586
glossary
NETOCRACY The informationalist upper class that assumes power by vir- tue of its social talent, its superior information management and its ability to see patterns and perceive nodes in a chaotic surrounding world.
NETWORK DYNAMICS The part of system- and complexity theory that studies how networks arise and change over time, as well as what effects this leads to within society’s different areas. And also a consistently met- aphysical explanatory model for The Internet Age in Bard & Söderqvist’s philosophy, is used synonymously with relationalism. See also plurarchy.
NETWORK PYRAMID The Network Society’s triangular power structure, developed and intimately explored in the book The Netocrats, where it is clear that successful networks in step with their success – to continue to be successful – must spin themselves off and discard dead meat in the form of underachieving members, this to safeguard the key members’ scant time and requested attention. It is a process that is repeated continually because of the external pressure.
THE NETWORK SOCIETY One of three classic concepts to describe The Internet Age, to be compared with The Information Society and The Com- munication Society; according to information-technological historiography all paradigms through history should be categorized as network societies, networks naturally do not arise only with The Internet, but rather it is an age-old phenomenon.
NEUTRAL MONISM The conviction that everything that we know of and to which we attribute a meaning influences everything else that we know of and to which we attribute a meaning in our universe. Existence is monist, not dualist. Not because it must be so, but because it happens to be so. Thus nor does there exist a moralator or an objective evaluator that can establish that one emergence vector is more important than any other – there quite simply does not exist anything else, superordinate, outside that which ex- ists – wherefore monism must be neutral in terms of value in order to be credible at all. Neutral monism is thus radically anti-reductionist.
NIHILISM An idea according to which existence lacks objective value since there does not exist any external, objective institution of valuation or moralator. Nihilism goes through four phases – the naive (unconscious), the
587
process and event
cynical (the nihilist pretends against better judgment that there are objec- tive values), the ironic (the nihilist builds their own internal and subjective values in opposition to the surrounding world’s falsely objective values), and finally the affirmative (the nihilist interprets the absence of objective values as a liberating possibility to create their own values and convince the environment of these created values’ excellence). This is the process that Nietzsche calls the death of God.
NODALIZATION The tribopoietic network of hierarchic nodes that always arise by necessity in an anarchic state. Nodalization is thereby also the shift from the local in direction toward the global within network dynamics. What previously was anarchy transitions into a plurarchy and the new par- adigm’s power structure with a new paradigmatics takes shape.
NOMADOLOGY The philosophical and religious conviction of the eternal recurrence of the same, a conception that dominates in all nomadic societies throughout history. Only with permanent settlement could one view the world and history differently, and this ancient Persian and phallic invention is summed up under the opposite concept, eventology.
OMNICENTRISM A state where all coordinates in a system regard them- selves as the system’s center, which leads to the system in practice lacking an authentic center. The system in question is quickly reduced to a kind of psychotic anarchy and can only be saved through a comprehensive nodali- zation. See further plurarchy.
ONTOEPISTEMOLOGY After the Hegelian process-philosophical revolu- tion in Germany in the 19th century, it becomes impossible to distinguish ontology as the doctrine of being from epistemology as the doctrine of knowledge. Relata arise out of relations and not the other way around. Sub- ject and substance are mutually dependent on each other for their existence; being is learning and learning is being.
OSCILLATION The fundamental mobilist state that consumes even less energy and therefore is even more universal and fundamental than the eternalist freeze. It is the metaphysical oscillation that Heraclitus refers to when he speaks the winged words panta rei, everything is in motion. When
588
glossary
we in this way speak of oscillation as a universal principle it is often called panorganicism. Please compare with pandialecticism.
THE OUTER CIRCUIT The outer, mobile, sparsely populated and male-dominated half of the sociont, ruled by elder patriarchs as a patriarchy; compare with the inner circuit that is ruled by a matriarchy and the shamanic caste that is ruled by a clergy.
PANDIALECTICISM The philosophical conviction that everything that is meaningful in existence fundamentally is dialectical in nature. The term is used synonymously with the concepts panchronism and panrelationalism. If all ontology operates dialectically, it also entails that everything is harbored within time and that everything of value can be explained as byproducts of relations where the dialectics of negation and oscillation deserves the epithet the first dialectics. Please compare with absolute historicism.
THE PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE The worldview as a continuous whole, impossible to reduce to the sum of the components. The imagined view of the phallic gaze and the concrete view of the contemporary satellites in orbit around planet Earth.
PANTHEOS From the Greek pan-theos, all is God and God is all; the second of the four divinities in the syntheological pyramid; pantheism regards everything that exists as a single cohesive phenomenon, the only, which thereby is tantamount to God himself.
PARADIGM The general worldview that harmonizes with the prevailing power structure’s self-image and that is replaced by a new one only when an information-technological revolution has produced a new set of conditions for all areas of society, which in turn propels comprehensive social changes. The theory of paradigms and paradigm shifts is originally presented by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who studies such development within the natural scientific disciplines.
PARADIGMATICS The conviction that Man does not change significantly over time because of genetic evolution’s slowness, while civilization chang- es increasingly fast because of memetic evolution’s explosivity. Knowledge and regulatory frameworks shall therefore only be changed and adapted
589
process and event
to current and future technological paradigms. If Man is the constant and technology is the variable, paradigmatics is the study of how collectively encompassed values change along the time axis.
PARADOXISM The conception that language arises as a treatment of par- adoxical aspects of existentially formative traumas; the deepest truths of existence can therefore only be expressed as consciously constructed par- adoxes, or not at all. From this it follows that the human subject only can exist and be developed as the paradoxist subject, which amuses itself with and allows itself to be inspired by processing its own built-in antagonisms. A representative of ancient paradoxism is Heraclitus. Hegel and Lacan devote their entire careers to describing this sole authentic form of subjectivity.
PARTICIPATORY CULTURE Events with varying durability where the participants build the event together; thus there are no performances and no spectators in the ordinary sense. Participatory culture is developed and grows in step with The Internet, for instance in the form of festivals such as Burning Man in the United States, Going Nowhere in Spain and Africa Burn in South Africa; see also flexhibitionism.
PATHOMATICS The underlying logical pattern in the development of a series of cohesive, phallic engagements. That is: how the two-headed phal- lus keeps its own intersubjectivity intact. The four constructive steps of potential, actual, directed and transcendental energy, which follow upon each other within pathomatics, can advantageously be compared with their destructive opposites in the four steps within nihilist development, from naive via cynical to ironic and finally affirmative nihilism. If narratology is the priest’s most important task, pathomatics is the chieftain’s most important contribution to the sociont.
PATHONOMY The pathological ideal within a specific paradigm, based on actual pathomatics. See further truth-as-an-act.
PATRIARCHY The power hierarchy between the men in the sociont, where the older men are superordinate to the younger; thereby also the power structure in the outer circuit dominated by the men.
590
glossary
THE PETER PAN SYNDROME A state where the child refuses to grow up and remains a child while it realizes and feels the attraction of phallic adult life. It is one of the prerequisites for a large-scale infantilization of society, where the madness is internal. Please compare with the Caligula syndrome where the madness instead is external.
THE PHALLIC GAZE The constantly coveted gaze of The Great Other that gives the subject the sole meaningful and credible confirmation and that distinguishes the brilliant from the mediocre. The phallic gaze becomes an ontic reality during informationalism when the satellites around Earth eventually monitor every square millimeter of the planet. See further sen- socracy.
THE PHALLIC INTRUSION The moment that happens to the child at around one year of age, when it for the first time is tempted away from the security at mamilla and discovers the seductive phallus as the object that the mother is attracted by, but that the child cannot give the mother, which generates envy in the child, something that in turn initiates the child’s voyage toward and yearning for adultification and generates an imitating and eroticizing of phallus.
THE PHALLIC PRINCIPLE OF TRIBAL CONTRIBUTION The ethical and social-psychological principle that all adult members of the sociont shall contribute to the good of the sociont as best they can in accordance with their personal archetypology. The principle rules out all forms of victim cults within the sociont.
PHALLOGOCENTRISM Originally an invective invented by philosopher Jacques Derrida, phallogocentrism is the belief that philosophy only can arise as a conscious focus on the dialectics of logos and pathos within the phallic world of the mind; Bard & Söderqvist claim in a kind of Hegelian opposition to “the pillar-saint” Derrida that phallogocentrism is a necessity that has not yet received its definite form.
PHALLUS The male sex organ and all that it symbolizes in the world of psychoanalysis.
591
process and event
PHARMAKON An in itself neutral phenomenon whose constructive and destructive effects respectively are entirely dependent on how it is used or misused. A preparation X can give a more or less harmless pleasure in low doses while it causes life-threatening intoxication at intake in high doses.
PHENOMENON From the Greek phainomenon – to show, shine, arise, man- ifest oneself. In syntheist onto-phenomenology the phenomenon replaces the classic object as a material point of reference vis-à-vis the Universe as a whole; this phenomenon distinguishes itself from the object as it primarily is a field consisting of relations that all are primary in an equally high degree and completely lack the object’s phallic substance and essence.
PHENOMENOLOGY The philosophical study of experiences and con- sciousness; an example of a syntheist phenomenology is the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism.
PHENOUMENOLOGY The unification of Kant’s separated phenomenol- ogy and a noumenology through the Hegelian dialectics where the project precedes and unites the subject that generates the object, precisely as the object that generates the subject. Phenoumenology dissolves Kantian cor- relationism by applying an even more fundamental relationalism to Kant’s conception that phenomenon and noumenon by definition are irreconcila- ble. Thereby phenoumenology invalidates Western dualism.
PLASTICITY Social elasticity, the sociont’s ability to benefit from the var- ious talents of single dividuals for the good of the collective, and capacity to give single dividuals in part an archetypal identity, in part a possibility to contribute to the common good.
PLURARCHY From the Latin pluralis for diversity and the Greek archos for governance; the chaotic state in the political sphere that follows upon democracy’s collapse at the paradigm shift from mass media one-way com- munication and its effective suppression of opinion to interactive multi-way communication with its unmanageable and unruly information flows.
POETIC INFINITY The only infinity we can allow ourselves with our intellectual honesty intact. Otherwise, the only thing that is infinite is the vacuousness that is concealed behind this substanceless concept. Please
592
glossary
compare with the related expression poetic justice. Just like justice, infinity can never be more than poetic.
PORNOFLATION A social-pornographic and gradually more extreme una- bashed display of the most intimate in order to create attention; not seldom exploited to produce cheap mass entertainment.
POWER TRIAD A long-term stable power structure always has three rather than two poles, for instance as the executive (president), the legisla- tive (congress) and the judicial (the Supreme Court) branches of the U.S. constitution. Bard & Söderqvist here launch a model that contains a real power, an imaginary power and a symbolic power within every informa- tion-technological paradigm.
PRAGMATISM Philosophical school founded by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James in the United States in the 19th century that receives a European equivalent in the heritage from Nietzsche’s existentialist philoso- phy. What is fundamental is that theories and faiths are evaluated in terms of their functionality. See further narratology.
PRIMITIVISM The first information-technological paradigm, arises in connection with Man learning to use the speech organs and communicating with words, which happens around 200,000 years ago, when our human species – Man – appears on the world stage as the first species ever with a history.
THE PRINCIPLE OF EXPLANATORY CLOSURE The insight that the Universe’s enormous expansion rules out an ontic rationalism and that the similarly enormous expansion of the amount of information in society rules out an ontological rationalism for precisely the same reason. What our brain does not have time to process it can never encompass either, which means the kiss of death for Kantian rationalism.
PROCESS PHILOSOPHY Is also called the ontology of becoming, a convic- tion that equates metaphysical reality with difference and change; receives its present, radical form in Alfred North Whitehead and constitutes a basic prerequisite for syntheist ontology.
593
process and event
PROCESS RELIGION A religious conviction based on a process-philosoph- ical metaphysics where syntheism is the process religion par excellence; not to be confused with the admittedly Whitehead-inspired but still post-Chris- tian school called process theology, as represented by among others Charles Hartshorne.
PROCESSUALITY A mutable truth of a mutable world. That is: the only possible and thereby, in a Hegelian sense, absolute truth in a constant- ly mutable world, and thus the direct opposite of all Platonist ambitions to attain Gnosis or eternal truth. Please note that all paradigmatics also is procedural. The difference is just that the seemingly timeless within par- adigmatics changes extremely slowly and applies across many paradigms, while the time-specific within paradigmatics is radically altered for every new paradigm.
PROTOPIANISM The conviction that the pair of opposites Utopia/Dys- topia is a false dichotomy, which has the consequence that an authentic eventology must be based on constant, incremental improvements of pro- cesses, and not on some manner of single brilliant ideas. Since protopianism thereby lacks a fixed Protopia, it is no protopianism but only a protopian movement forward. Protopianism is the dominant creative ideal during informationalism. The protopians are thereby the third and symbolic power order during informationalism, after the informationalists themselves and the sensocrats.
PSEUDO-TRIBES Tribe-like groupings that however lack the sociont’s comprehensive flora of complementing archetypes and which therefore sooner or later collapse under the discontent that stems from the members’ frustrated expectations of tribal satisfaction.
THE PSYCHOGRAM A map of all active psyches on the planet and their paradigmatic activities at a given occasion. The psychogram as an idea pro- pels the idea of rule via a perfect sensocracy within the global empire. Think of it as an imagined map of all mental and sensory states on a specific planet at a specific moment.
594
glossary
QUANTUM ORGANICS A more well-functioning concept than quantum mechanics since the phenomenon in question exposes vastly more organic than mechanical characteristics.
RATIONALISM The conviction that Man is born with the capacity to mentally and intellectually understand and encompass the world logically in its entirety.
REDUCTIONISM The conception that even the most complex phenomena in a meaningful way can be divided into their smallest components; accord- ing to reductionism all forms of emergence are illusory.
RELATIONALISM A radicalization of the relativist worldview, where even the seemingly stable objects are dissolved and set in motion vis-à-vis themselves and where there consequently no longer exist any fixed points whatsoever vis-à-vis something other than the only, that is: the Universe as a whole. A theory that was first developed by Alfred North Whitehead to later be refined by quantum physicist Niels Bohr and mathematician David Bohm.
RELATIVISM A worldview where all objects are in constant motion vis- à-vis each other; the objects are thus fixed within and before themselves, but completely background-independent vis-à-vis their surrounding world.
RESSENTIMENT A hatred directed toward human existence and its pre- requisites, an embittered self-contempt that is projected onto the world. See further the Cybelian lynch mob and the dialectics of ressentiment.
THE REVOLT AGAINST PHALLUS Psychoanalytical concept for teenage rebellion, a trial of the parent generation’s alleged excellence and omnis- cience that ends up with the adult authorities being toppled from their pedestals, wherefore the teenage subject must conquer its own phallicness, adultness and autonomy with all that this entails by way of taking respon- sibility and finding meaning. When this revolt is carried out successfully and has resulted in a functional self-identity, this is confirmed officially by the sociont with an initiation ritual.
595
process and event
ROOT-OF-THE-PHALLUS The foundation and historical grounding of phallic power. The reflective wisdom that gives credibility to phallus’ ac- tivity and project. An example is all the genealogies that in various religious and social/hierarchical contexts shall guarantee legitimacy to various claims on power.
SADOMASOCHISM A primarily erotically charged relation between a rul- er and a slave, as a sexual subculture limited by social codes, but as a social phenomenon boundless in its dialectical movement toward the ruler’s total distancing from and isolation vis-à-vis the slave, see cephalization.
SAOSHYANT The original, Persian savior figure that personifies eventolo- gy through his arrival at the end of the empire’s heyday and saving it from demise. The Jews inherit the concept from the Zoroastrians, but reduce the phallic saoshyant from a global to a local figure who is called mashiach and who only directs its caring toward his own nation. This figure later returns as the Messiah within Christianity and Islam.
SCHIZOANALYSIS Anarchist response to Lacanian psychoanalysis, pri- marily developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in France during the 1970s and aims toward a growing dividual heterogeneity rather than the individual homogeneity that arguably was the vision of classical psy- choanalysis.
SELF-LOVE An ethical-logical decision – and thus not an emotion – to accept oneself and one’s own body with its physiological and mental pre- requisites and expressions; self-love has nothing to do with narcissism, but is rather its exact opposite; see also amor fati.
SENSOCRACY A social and/or political system built around a technology of sensors that collect and compile data from all information flows and that therefore with great accuracy can predict what every citizen at every moment requests and yearns for, something that previously has been im- possible because of the extensive lying at all levels. In a sensocracy coercive measures in practice become superfluous: a devastating majority of society’s citizens settle for having their needs of consumption and entertainment effectively satisfied. The others lack all influence and are referred to an existence outside the system. The sensocrats thereby become the second and
596
glossary
imaginary power structure during the informationalist paradigm, between the informationalists themselves and the protopians. See further the phallic gaze.
THE SHADOW The part of the subject that it does not acknowledge, alter- natively does not even perceive in itself thanks to efficient repression. The concept was originally launched by C G Jung. Please compare with Bard & Söderqvist’s concept asubject and the night of the world in G W F Hegel.
THE SHAMANIC CASTE The deviating minority within the sociont that neither belongs to the inner circuit and its matriarchy nor to the outer circuit and its patriarchy, but instead in part acts as a messenger between the inner and the outer circuit, in part acts as a border-transcender in the sociont’s outer edges as shamans and prophets vis-à-vis the sociont itself and as diplomats and priests vis-à-vis tribes in the environments. The border-crossers within the sociont, between the circuits, are called the androgynous caste. See further archetypology.
THE SILK ROAD TRIAD The process religion that was practiced in various forms in so-called castags along the Eurasian Silk Road and that was for- malized by the Persians as Zoroastrianism, by the Chinese as Taoism, and by the Indians as Buddhism, with all manner of hybrid schools in between. Please compare with the Disney World triad.
SINGULARITY An extraordinary historical event – the Universe arises through the Big Bounce, living organisms arise through an evolutionary process, and so on – that immediately changes world history in a truly fundamental manner; see also emergence.
SOCIAL MASOCHISM A masochistic attitude to supremacy on the social arena, a stubborn quest for social and mortidinal submission, see further sadomasochism.
SOCIAL RELATIONALISM The conception that the principles presented by Niels Bohr for relationalist physics are just as applicable to the social sciences; see further network dynamics and relationalism.
SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY Techniques with which to control humans and manipulate them in a direction that is desirable for the power structure;
597
process and event
social technologies can encompass anything from the production of ideol- ogy and radio broadcasts to censorship legislation and declarations of war. Whatever works to accumulate power is a social technology.
SOCIOANALYSIS Truth maximization in the social arena, to be compared with the application of psychoanalysis on the single human dividual. So- cioanalysis tracks and exposes the pathological patterns that constantly are reborn within the sociont. This method is called symptomatology.
SOCIOGRAPHY Mapping of social relations between dividuals and networks, for instance through sociograms that show who knows and communicates with whom; see also network pyramid.
SOCIOMETRICS Compilation and illustration of social status and at- tentional power in The Network Society. Anyone can communicate with anyone else, but everyone will not receive a response from everyone else.
THE SOCIONT The original, plastic nomadic tribe that is kneaded by evo- lution over hundreds of thousands of years. Because of humanity’s rapid and worldwide spread, all living humans today are products of the sociont and shaped by its specific archetypology. The only meaningful changes that occur in civilization are technological, external vis-à-vis sociontology, and therefore connected to paradigmatics.
SOCIONTOLOGY The studies of the original nomadic tribe as a container for the development of intratribal archetypes. Please compare with arche- typology.
SPACETIME That of the two natural time dimensions that is dependent upon physical space. Spacetime is local, discrete, relative and bound to phys- ics within the natural sciences. From a metaphysical perspective it appears as ontic and actual. Please compare with its implicate precursor hypertime.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS Bard & Söderqvist’s equivalent of the unconscious in classical psychoanalysis; the subconscious is on closer inspection not un- conscious, but however chaotic and unstructured vis-à-vis the conscious, but it interacts both actively and reactively and both with and against the
598
glossary
conscious all the time. The subconscious is driven by mortido or the death drive, in contrast to consciousness which is driven by libido or the will-to- life.
THE SUBLIME The sphere where ambivalence and extimacy meet and generate a maximal obsession in the subject, for instance the near-death-ex- perience with its character of infinite sorrow and infinite beauty at once; see also ambivalence and the cathexal object. In syntheology, the sublime is often divided into tremendum and fascinans.
SUBPHYSICS The hypertemporal emergence vector that precedes and un- derpins the emergence of spatiotemporal physics in history.
SUBSISTENCE A concept developed by Danish philosopher Alexander Wrede Elung for the pre-relational that, through it still only being virtual and lacking potent relations, cannot be attributed any existence. Subsist- ing virtualities are thus the implicate order before an emergence and its radical relationalism converts them into existing potentialities that then are negated into actualities. The latter are within physics called fields and particles respectively where the continuous becomes discrete. To the extent an existence is considered to express itself as a substance we can also play with the idea that a subsistence may express itself as an exceptionally virtual hyperstance. Please see further V P A (virtuality – potentiality – actuality).
SYMBIOTIC INTELLIGENCE The optimal intelligence that is created in the collaboration between Man and The Machine. When such an intelli- gence surpasses what human and synthetic intelligence respectively produce each on its own, this is called symbiotic transcendence.
SYNTHEISM From the Greek syntheos with the meaning created God or God that arises where humans create; God as a generic name of all Man’s dreams and visions, which entails a dissolution of the antagonism between theism and atheism.
THE SYNTHEOLOGICAL PYRAMID Trilateral geometrical construction with Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos as the three corners at the base with lines drawn in part between each other, in part up to the top that gives its name to the entire construction: Syntheos.
599
process and event
SYNTHEOLOGY The insight that theology always has been about the paradigmatic shift from yesterday’s magic to tomorrow’s technology. God is not something that is needed in the past nor even in the present, but it is instead the name of the objective and meaning of technological de- velopment. And as such, God is also the name of humanity’s own death. Therefore syntheology is built around virtual divinities, as the ultimate narrative of the relation between Man and technology. Syntheology solves negative theology’s dilemma of the death of God by claiming that God, rather than being dead, has not yet been born. God does not create us, we create God.
SYNTHEOS From Greek, created god or god that arises where humans cre- ate, the fourth, concluding and summarizing concept in the syntheological pyramid. Syntheos is also the name of the emergence that has not yet taken place in history, but that human culture thanks to its technology will create or bring about. Whether Man himself survives Syntheos’ arrival is an open question. See further Anti-Syntheos.
SYSTEMIC CAUSALITY The insight that causality, the chain from cause to effect along the time axis, always applies, but must be understood system- ically or transdeterministically rather than objectively or deterministically in a universe characterized by neutral monism. Effect is the carrot and cause is the stick in all happenings, but as an endlessly complex process where everything in the Universe is participating and affecting everything else. See further tribopoiesis.
THEOLOGICAL ANARCHISM The conception that The Network Society offers a unique historical possibility to realize the anarchist Utopia and thereby liberate the collective libido’s forces; the concept is synonymous with philosopher Simon Critchley’s ideal mystical anarchism.
TECHNOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE An intelligence that is developed within electronic machines instead of within biological organisms. Techno- logical intelligence does not merely develop very much faster than biological intelligence during the course of civilization. It can also, in contrast to biological intelligence, conquer outer space on its own behalf. See further Syntheos and symbiotic intelligence.
600
glossary
TOTALISM The conviction that existence can be understood both as a whole and in detail, just as history can be summarized and concluded, all this with the aid of the philosophical genius’ rationality. The idea exists already in Plato and has never really disappeared, even though we ourselves firmly maintain that the principle of explanatory closure makes all forms of totalism both ontically and ontologically impossible; see also transration- alism. Hegel brazenly converts the totalist ambition to the insight that the constantly incomplete is the total in itself, and calls this insight absolute knowledge, whereupon the metaphysical project is assumed complete.
TRANSCENDENCE To exceed the limits for the present existence, in Bard & Söderqvist’s psychoanalytical theory also the name of the fourth human drive, the sacral aspect of libido beyond the animal (instinct), the mechan- ical (drive) and the human (desire).
TRANSCENDENTAL EMERGENTISM The metaphysical conviction that history consists of various emergences and their vectors, and that no metalaws exist outside the specific emergence vectors besides “the law” of existence’s fundamental contingency, that is: there only exists one metalaw and it is the law stating that no metalaw exists. The fact that everything seems to influence everything else in our actual universe is thereby only a contingent event. Existence’s neutral monism is in itself no predetermined metalaw. In the same way that no emergence vector can or must be pri- oritized above another, other than as an expression of anthropocentric arbitrariness. The transcendental in transcendental emergentism thus consists both of the irreducibility of the various emergence vectors vis-à- vis each other and the irreducibility of potential future emergences vis-à-vis today’s actual theory. See further emergence vector theory and paradigmatics.
TRANSDETERMINISM The conviction that the pair of opposites de- terminism/indeterminism only are applicable to local phenomena in existence, which entails that existence as a whole neither can be regarded as determinist nor indeterminist; indeterminism’s dialectical overcoming of determinism can therefore only be completed in the form of transdeter- minism in a pandialectical universe.
601
process and event
TRANSFERENCE Transfer of agency, the social masochist surrender of one’s own agency in favor of another agent that is considered to own both the phallic gaze and perfect knowledge.
TRANSGRESSION Exceeding of prevailing laws, rules and norms, fol- lowed by an enjoyment of this exceeding, fundamental for both sexual and social perversion.
TRANSHUMANISM Broad digital lifestyle and subculture with powerfully netocratic overtones; the leading ideas revolve around how the technologi- cal development results in a posthuman state colored by cryonics, artificial intelligence, chemical liberation and anarcho-libertarian utopianism, and more.
TRANSRATIONALISM The insight that Man’s consciousness has been developed to optimize the chances for survival and procreation, not to un- cover the truth about the world, wherefore rationality must be clear about its own limitations; see further rationalism, narratology, and the principle of explanatory closure.
TRAUMATOLOGY The optimally creative treatment and follow-up of the failed event. In this way Christianity is the ultimate traumatology, since its savior (see saoshyant) failed and was executed on a cross. Therapeutic attempts to integrate suicide, divorces and bankruptcies are typically trau- matological projects in everyday life.
TREND An irrevocable active change of the social playing conditions, connected to a technological change of the material conditions; compare with countertrend.
TRIBAL MAPPING A territorial archetypology that encompasses the entire sociont in its broad-ranging diversity. Synonymous with the more formal concept archetypography.
THE TRIBAL SINGULARITY The conviction that the formation of the so- ciont constitutes the most important step in Man’s development. Categories such as individual and collective can only be described as sub-categories that lie beneath the really fundamental sociont. The human libido is connected
602
glossary
to the sociont’s survival and not to that of the individual or collective. Adult loyalty belongs to the sociont.
TRIBOPOIESIS A basic metaphysical principle stating that everything is born from a collective of relations and that everything returns to a collective of relations within all emergence vectors. Nothing is born by itself, there is no autopoiesis. This means for Man that everything of value is born out of and relates to the sociont, which is there both before a man is born and remains after a man dies.
TRUTH-AS-AN-ACT An ontological and ethical concept, developed by philosopher Alain Badiou with inspiration from Søren Kierkegaard, where there never is time to test truth through the drawn-out intersubjective pro- cesses that Karl Popper and Jürgen Habermas advocate, but where truth instead emerges as an unwavering decision based upon intuition.
THE TWO-HEADED PHALLUS The authentic phallus gets its authenticity from the division into will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence. The two-headed phallus’ mythos is built on the mutual love and respect that the priest and the chieftain show each other, the priest that personifies phallic wisdom and the chieftain that personifies phallic energy.
UNIMATRICHALISM A temporary, chaotic state in which the inner, ma- triarchal circuit has taken over the entire sociont or society. A unimatrichal society can only be nomadological and never eventological, as the latter would require a considerable measure of phallic energy.
UNIPATRICHALISM A temporary state of something that can be likened to a totalitarian dictatorship where the outer, patriarchal circuit has taken over the entire sociont or society.
UNIVERSOCENTRISM A worldview that takes the Universe in its entirety as the centre of existence as its point of departure; syntheism is built on a universocentric metaphysics in contrast to for instance capitalist humanism, which is an anthropocentric religion.
WILL-TO-POWER The universally expressed libido’s response to the uni- versally present mortido, also called will-to-expansion. This Nietzschean
603
process and event
concept is divided within syntheology between the priestly will-to-intel- ligence and the royal will-to-transcendence. Wishing to summarize history in its necessity and wishing to conquer the future in its contingency are ultimately two completely different wills for two completely different forms of power. As a third complementing power, there is moreover matrichal will-to-reproduction which only and always seeks the eternal recurrence of the same.
VOYEURISM Indirect pleasure of watching direct, proxy pleasure when one views some kind of sexual or social display; compare with exhibitionism and the phallic gaze.
V P A (VIRTUALITY – POTENTIALITY – ACTUALITY) The pandia- lectical, ontological causality chain within transcendental emergentism. First we imagine a virtuality that is a hypertemporal subsistence without external relations. When such a virtuality interacts with another virtuality, a spatiotemporal existence that we call a potentiality is generated, potent because it in contrast to virtuality is placed in a relationalist spacetime. When potentiality then is subject to decoherence, it is broken down until it has been reduced to a sole singular event, an actuality, for instance as the wave function collapse in physics. Virtuality is non-ontic and non-actual, potentiality is ontic but non-actual, actuality is both ontic and actual. V P A is necessary in order to be able to think emergences, the event of events that changes history forever. The potential habits before the emergence become the actual laws within the new emergence vector. And these laws are the only – strictly local – laws that exist in an on-the-whole contingent universe without global laws.
THE WORLD STATE Socioeconomic merging of all the world’s states in such a way that the mutual dependence becomes so strong that it balances the dividing forces and supplies a necessary platform for supranational de- cision-making; Bard & Söderqvist use the concept repeatedly as a synonym for The Global Empire.
604
Process and Event
Copyright © Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist 2023
> Open Glossary <
ABJECT The object against which the masses – the mob – direct their hatred and disgust and thereby experience unity. The organization of this collective distancing creates longed-for order in the chaos of the world. This can happen constructively, in conjunction with the phallic intrusion and the shift of the child’s focus from mamilla (the first abject) to yearning for phallus, or destructively, when the false phallus promises rewards from which all outsiders are excluded. See also hyperject and anoject.
ABSOLUTE HISTORICISM The conception that time is the most real of all realities and the vessel within which everything else exists. A recurring argument for absolute historicism is that nothing can be thought of outside time, but time can be thought of independently of everything else. If time moreover is split between on the one hand hypertime and on the other hand spacetime, there arises a dialectics on which the rest of existence can be grounded. This generates the epistemological horizon that Hegel calls absolute knowledge. Please compare with pandialecticism.
ADULTIFICATION The archetypological development from children to adults, from adults to leaders, parents, mentors and revered elders. The adultification ideal should be contrasted with Christianity’s and Islam’s celebrations of the child, innocence and unreflected submission. Within Zoroastrianism and Judaism the followers are expected to behave as the adults of God and not as the children of God.
ADYTONOLOGY The tantric laws and rules that only apply inside the temple, in contrast to the sutric laws and rules that apply in the society outside. From the Greek adyton which means temple yard. Please compare with the barred absolute and please note that the adytonological rules always remain unwritten, which is why they never can be spread outside the temple, where they would be incomprehensible and generate destructive confusion.
AGENCY The subjective identity that arises as a mental emergence in a physical body as a relationalist phenomenon. The syntheist agent replaces the Cartesian individual as the human ideal at the transition from capitalism to informationalism; see also dividual.
ALIENATION According to Karl Marx, Man becomes a stranger vis-à-vis the world and himself through being reduced to an insignificant cog in a production machinery to which it is impossible to relate. Thus humans are isolated from each other, which prevents them from coming together and taking control of their lives.
AMBIVALENCE The fundamental property in that which attracts Man the most, while it also frightens and repels: that which is neither good nor evil (or else both); see also cathexis and the sublime.
AMOR FATI ”Love of fate” in Latin, an attitude to life that means that one accepts the history that has led to the prevailing situation and that one submits to that which one cannot influence in the future. The concept was introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche and is a fundamental principle for the ethics of interactivity.
THE ANDROGYNOUS CASTE The persons, not seldom so-called non-binary, who act as contact surface between the patriarchy in the outer circuit and the matriarchy in the inner circuit. This caste shall be understood as a kind of cousins of outsidership to the shamanic caste, who live outside the sociont and between the tribes.
ANOJECT A silent, implicit agreement within the Cybelian lynch mob that, if it is verbalized, rapidly is personified in the form of the tyrant. A widespread anojectivity paves the way for false phalluses, as in Germany, the Soviet Union, China and Iran during the 20th century. Thus the anoject is the voice of the false phallus throughout history.
ANTAGONY A resistance with a value in itself, which one seeks in order to sharpen one’s own intelligence. Without antagony a system becomes one long eternal, sterile repetition of itself, without fertile ground for development.
ANTI-SYNTHEOS A technology that is so destructive that it kills both all human life and all technological intelligence if its energies are allowed to run rampant. Anti-Syntheos arrived at planet Earth on 6 August 1945 in the form of the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima. Ever since that day we have been living in its shadow.
ANTISYNTHEOS To view everything exclusively from Man’s perspective, as though the world were created for us and would go under without us; please compare with network-dynamics and universocentrism.
ARCHETYPOLOGY The study of subject and object as evolutionary byproducts of the sociont’s development. Please compare with sociontology. An archetype is a figure, a motive, or a thought pattern that exists in the collective subconscious and that controls people’s stance vis-à-vis their existence and their surrounding world. Please compare with archetypography (see tribal mapping).
ASUBJECT The subject’s dark, unknown shadow side, which at the same time is the subject’s mortidinal negation and thereby the engine that powers the entire subjectivity; what Hegel calls the night of the world.
ATHEISM A conception according to which a certain god (or several) (or all) does not exist and lacks social-psychological relevance.
ATHEOS Greek concept for the god that does not exist and that precisely therefore exists as an empty concept, as the god-that-does-not-exist, the virtual non-existence out of which existence arises; the first of the four divinities in the syntheological pyramid and the theological representative of the human subject itself.
ATOMISM The conception that the world is constructed from indivisible, material components; atomism does for the object what humanism does for the subject, wherefore both these isms are two sides of the same coin: individualism.
ATTENTION A value that is computed through media credibility being multiplied with media attention for one and the same meme, dividual, et cetera. A high attentional value is the key to power and influence in The Network Society. It is what the sensors of machines and senses of humans want more and not less of.
ATTENTIONALISM A system where the elite’s attention replaces capital as the central value of the economy and the culture, a value that relates to power and status. The ongoing paradigm shift entails that capitalism is phased out and is replaced by attentionalism.
AUGMENTED TERRITORY The dissolution of duality between the digital and the physical, an area that both is a digital domain and a physical territory at once. Is used as an abstract and artistic synonym of the concrete and judicial concept called the network state.
AUTOEXPLOITATION The narcissistic subject’s plundering of its own substance until nothing remains. The opposite is the functional and interactive subject’s development and augmentation of its own substance – autoimploitation. The former assumes autopoiesis as the first principle of creativity, the latter assumes tribopoiesis, and this very shift is precisely the paradigm shift from capitalism to attentionalism.
THE BARRED ABJECT The collective fantasy of a concealed or fabricat- ed object that is concealed behind the barred absolute. The hatred of this phantasm can unite the collective when there is no longer anything else that functions cohesively. The principle of the barred abject explains why all forms of anarchy end up with a cohesive conspiracy theory, which in turn results in a meaningless bloodbath. See further anoject.
THE BARRED ABSOLUTE The conviction that existence contains knowl- edge that only can be handled by the right person on the right occasion and that cannot be made generally available. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and the Eastern religions are built on the barred absolute as their foundation. It is the difference between sutra and tantra in the Silk Road triad. Only Christianity and Islam proclaim that the barred absolute is removed and that all true believers have direct and unfiltered access to God. Which has dramatic consequences.
THE BODY MACHINES The third and final installation in The Futurica Trilogy by Bard & Söderqvist with a focus on The Internet Age’s new, materialist and monist view of humanity and the death of the individual.
THE CALIGULA SYNDROME A state that arises when the child is prevented from growing up by its environment and remains a child forever, while it is susceptible to the temptation of phallic adult life – one of the prerequisites for society’s comprehensive infantilization. Please compare with the Peter Pan syndrome, where the obstacle/inhibition is internal instead of external.
CAPITALISM The third of the four information-technological paradigms that arises when both reading and writing proficiency as well as virtual value transfer are spread with devastatingly unprecedented efficiency thanks to the printing press; the concept is often used synonymously with industrialism.
THE CATHEXAL OBJECT The radically different quality found in the phallus, as a both exciting and frightening object, compared to the safe and secure mamilla – precisely by virtue of this ambivalent sublimeness phallus is extremely attractive, which lures the child away from mamilla. See further ambivalence.
CATHEXIS The Greek word that Sigmund Freud uses to denote ambivalence’s obscure power of attraction; see further ambivalence and the sublime.
CEPHALIZATION Originally a biological concept that denotes one module’s need of spinning off and protecting its memory and its intelligence from the rest of the system to optimize its chance of survival. The cephalization of a civilization must take place behind the barred absolute, where it is possible to experiment without being inhibited by prevailing laws and rules.
CHEMICAL LIBERATION The conception that increased availability of chemical substances for radical mind-altering fundamentally changes the idea of what it means to be human; in part through Man discovering himself as a chemical-hormonal phenomenon, in part through the division between the first subject that decides what chemicals are to be added and the second subject that then experiences the radically altered mind; see further transhumanism.
CHRONOTHEOLOGY The conviction that theology first and fore- most must handle time as the divine foundation for everything else. A chrono-theological historiography places God in the past, in the present, or in the future, rather than at any particular geographical spot.
CIVILIZATION An expanding and gradually more complex organization of the collective togetherness, fundamentally governed by the development of communication technologies. At the cost of an increasingly harshly regulated drive economy, civilization offers security and growth.
CIVILIZATIONISM A phallic conviction that a growing information accumulation in itself enables not only a more integrated but also a better world in an objective sense, that civilization as such has an intrinsic value; Zoroaster in ancient Central Asia around 1700 BC is often regarded as the first pronounced civilizationist.
THE COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS The sociont’s partly implicit agreement in matters large and small, human subconsciousness in its collective form, the unspoken ideology of any given society.
COSMOPOLITANISM The completion of the industrial revolution and the urbanization of the entire planet, in syntheological terms: the city of God. Thereby it is also the imploitative response to environmentalism’s dystopian lamentation at Man’s exploitative attitude to culture. Please compare with ecotopianism.
THE COMMUNICATION SOCIETY One of three classic concepts to describe The Internet Age, to be compared with The Information Society and The Network Society. According to information-technological historiography all paradigms throughout history should be categorized as communication societies, since precisely the dominant communication technology is what ultimately shapes and decides what sort of construction and degree of com- plexity a society can handle.
CONSUMTARIAT The underclass of the Internet Age, characterized by a passive consumption of mass produced goods and services; see also hypernarcissism, pornoflation, interpassivity and the dialectics of ressentiment.
CONTINGENCY A generic concept within process philosophy that entails every form of freedom and indicates that the Universe fundamentally is an open history. Chance is a reality and the number of unknown variables is poetically infinite.
CONTINUITY An emergence vector or a phenomenon whose smallest components must be described as constantly displaced relation complexes vis-à-vis each other. There is quite simply no meaningful smallest atomist component or eternalization to refer to, only a series of relations of transdeterminist force fields. Please compare with its opposite discretion.
COUNTERTREND The passive and generally unreflected reaction to an active trend, where the trend is grounded in actual material change of prevailing conditions of power, while the counter trend starts from a discomfort at the trend (and change in general), at paradigm shifts as an aggressive defense of the old paradigm against the new.
CORRELATIONISM The conviction that Man only has access to the correlation between thinking and being, but never direct access to thinking or being separately. This idea is a driving force within Western thinking from Immanuel Kant and onward but is criticized by the model-dependent realism that is associated with physicist Niels Bohr, and later also with philosopher Karen Barad.
THE CYBELIAN LYNCH MOB A mob led by the embittered Cybele, who by mistake had fallen in love with her own grandson Attis, and who became mad with jealousy when he fell in love with a young princess (“Hell hath no fury... ̈). The Cybelian lynch mob forges ahead across the world when the apocalypse nears, and slaughters masses of innocent victims in pure frustration and rage. Please compare with its opposite the Dionysian swarm. And please note the name of its agreed-upon cohesive inner voice, the anoject. An anoject in a uniform always foreshadows the very worst, since it invariably is a question of a false phallus whose path into the future leads straight toward the death-worshipping doomsday cult.
DEEP ATHEISM An idea according to which atheism taken to its utmost extreme dialectically morphs into syntheism, an idea that is explored in the book Syntheism – Creating God in the Internet Age. It may well be that God does not exist today, but it does not entail that God cannot exist tomorrow. Not if we create God ourselves.
DEMONOLOGY An umbrella concept for the studies of and/or the doctrine of demons and evil spirits; in Bard & Söderqvist customarily used in relation to a theory on abjectification that explores how a demonized abject is created and exploited.
DESIRE The linguistic and thereby uniquely human of the drive system’s four expressions, a more or less compulsive searching for something that basically is unattainable, since the objective of desire always withdraws and changes its guise; see further instinct, drive and transcendence.
DETERMINISM An idea that everything that happens is preordained and bound by laws of nature, wherefore will and intentions ultimately do not matter. Determinism dominates the Western history of ideas from Plato to Einstein, but is unable to handle the randomness that it therefore must deny in the same manner that Plato and Einstein deny time and change; see further the Bohrian opposite indeterminism.
DIALECTICS A logical process where a phenomenon is played out against its opposite, which results in a completely new phenomenon at a higher level. The concepts that customarily are used are thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Heraclitus is seen by many as he who introduces dialectics in philosophy, while Hegel is seen by many as he who perfects the methodology.
THE DIALECTICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS The psychoanalytical equivalent of the narratological triad distinguishes between consciousness (logos), the subconscious (mythos), and the unconscious (pathos). Consciousness is housed in the rational brain, the subconscious is housed in the mimetic brain, and the unconscious is housed in the emotional brain. The brain’s only way of getting a grip on the world is to fuse logos and pathos into a social mythos – see tribopoiesis – but this mythos is never more than temporary, wherefore the dialectical process constantly must be repeated.
THE DIALECTICS OF ETERNALISM AND MOBILISM A complete syntheist onto-phenomenology developed by Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist in the book The Global Empire; existence is fundamentally chaotic – or mobilist – and becomes tangible and receives meaning only through an illusory act of the perception apparatus, where phenomena are fixed in spacetime and thereby made to last forever or eternalized. This is functional and necessary in order for us to be able to orient ourselves in the world in the first place, but philosophically problematic. The solution is to allow the eternalizations to next go mobilist in relation to one another, submitting everything to a dialectical process, see pandialecticism.
THE DIALECTICS OF LIBIDO AND MORTIDO The continuous interplay between will-to-life (libido), located in consciousness, and the death drive (mortido), located in subconsciousness – two phenomena within psychoanalysis that both are each other’s antagonic opposites and simultaneously two complementing counterweights in the drive economy.
THE DIALECTICS OF NEGATION AND OSCILLATION Where the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism is eventological, the dialectics of negation and oscillation is negatological. The first dialectics arises when something dies in a chaos, not when an order is created. In this way negatology precedes the subsequent eventology. The dialectics of negation and oscillation is ontic while the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism is ontological.
THE DIALECTICS OF RESSENTIMENT A dialectically destructive process within a dividual, a group or a society, which begins with support for a self-appointed victim, later to be developed into a frantic struggle between many different alleged victims about who has the right to demand the most sympathies and the greatest compensation. The ressentiment vis-à-vis the world and fate is gradually stepped up as the conflicts increase.
THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION The dialectical interplay between Man and technology in four steps during an information- technological paradigm shift, first a technological disruption, followed by a new metaphysical idea, thereafter an explosion that causes a great chaos, and finally a return to order in chaos.
THE DIGITAL PATRIARCHY The great comeback for male networks when technology plays out its cards and takes over the world in the digital age. The cause is archetypological: It is the engineer (the warrior) and the businessman (the hunter) who create and control added value in the attentional economy that rapidly becomes increasingly complex.
THE DIONYSIAN SWARM Triggered by the inevitable patricide, the murder of the old paradigm’s corrupt and outdated leaders, the Dionysian swarm forges ahead on streets and squares and carries out the authentic revolution. Its leader has come from the future and is called the Saoshyant – the phallus that leads the swarm from one age to another, or from one territory to another, according to the new paradigm’s exodology. He personifies the hyperject which already was spread as the implicit joint voice within the swarm before the Saoshyant turned up. Please compare with its opposite amid social movements, the Cybelian lynch mob, which slaughters the innocent since it has no phallic direction whatsoever.
DISCRETION An emergence vector or a phenomenon whose smallest components can be reduced to a kind of ones and zeroes, or a state that either is turned on or off. Please compare with its opposite continuity.
THE DISNEY WORLD TRIAD The three religions that arise in the United States as a kind of absurd, parodic reflection of the Silk Road triad in Eurasia: Jehovah’s Witnesses as the neurotic version, Mormonism as the psychotic version, and Scientology as the perverted version of American individualism as a religious expression.
DIVIDUALISM The antithesis to individualism’s ideology, the conviction that humans and things are irreducible multiplicities that cannot be described as single, cohesive phenomena; see further network dynamics. The dividual is the antithesis of the conception of an individual, that is: a human that lacks an indivisible and unalterable inner core and that instead is infinitely divisible and highly plastic; please compare with agency.
DRIVE The category in the needs system that pertains to mechanical expression, for instance: the craving for food, drink, sleep and protection, but also for sex, power and aggression; compare with instinct, desire and transcendence.
THE ECOLOGICAL APOCALYPSE The dystopian conviction that capitalism’s development entails that Earth’s finite resources eventually will be spent and that environmental degradation reaches the point where human life on the planet eventually no longer is possible.
ECOTOPIANISM The completion of the agricultural revolution and a ruralization of the entire planet, syntheologically called the garden of God. Hence also the imploitative answer to a dystopian lamentation over Man’s exploitative attitude toward nature. In a parallel manner, cosmopolitanism is the completion of the industrial revolution and an urbanization of the entire planet.
EGALITARIANISM An ideological conviction that all humans in a society have the same value and should be treated as equals before the law, and as such it is the standard axiom when fighting identitarianism and its victimhood culture.
EMERGENCE When the properties in a system under certain prerequisites change so that the system in question transitions from one state to another, such as when water at a certain temperature becomes ice and at another temperature becomes steam. From a social-psychological perspective it entails a transdeterminist stance: the future is open – suddenly the quantitative difference is qualitative and conditions for the entire activity are thereby totally changed.
EMERGENCE VECTOR THEORY A universal metaphysics whose starting point is the explicate order with its specific laws as the direct consequence of an emergence. Please note that in a neutrally monist universe all previous emergence vectors are part of the implicate order, which transdeterministically triggers the actual emergence. What are developed to the eternalist laws within the explicate order were thus only the mobilist habits within the implicate order. The only metalaw that applies outside the specific emergence vectors is the fundamental contingency of existence. See further transcendental emergentism.
ENORMITIES AND ENORMITESIMALS The insight that we live in a finite and limited universe compels us to admit that infinities and infinitesimals are impossible and inconceivable. One therefore gets a correct description of existence’s mathematical extremes if the infinities are replaced by enormities and the infinitesimals are replaced by enormitesimals. Correspondingly, the number zero can never have the value zero, since its mere existence in itself generates an oscillating value whose average may be zero but that never at any point in time can be exactly zero.
ENTHEISM The process-philosophical idea according to which existence best is described as differences in various layers atop each other, and that the duration that is a yardstick for the genesis and completion of the differences is absolute, and therefore must constitute the foundation for both the material and spiritual worldview.
ENTHEOGEN Narcotic substance that gives rise to strong visions and emotions, which the users often describe as religious experiences; examples of entheogens are preparations such as LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA.
ENTHEOS Originally means ”the god inside” in Greek, that is: the divine that the syntheist agent derives from within herself, the third of the four divinities in the syntheological pyramid.
EPIMEMETICS The eternal rehashing of the same constantly reused symbols, an obsession with tonality and etiquette for the purpose of suffocating all references to an underlying substance and its movements. Characteristic of states of cynical nihilism during dramatic paradigm shifts.
EPISTEMOLOGY Theory of knowledge – the philosophical discipline that studies knowledge and knowledge’s (im)possibility; for a deeper understanding of syntheological epistemology, see further the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism, transrationalism and the principle of explanatory closure.
ETERNALISM The thought that a worldview must be built on the temporary eternalizations that perception produces within the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism, which means that the worldview constantly must be reassessed and updated, and after a paradigm shift also phased out and replaced.
ETERNALIZATION A freezing or fixation of the world’s mobilist chaos, an existential necessity for perception to be able to create a satisfactory (illusion of) order in the chaos of existence and produce a functional worldview within which the subject can arise and build an identity of its own. It is however important not to confuse the map with the terrain and imagine that the simplified image displays reality as it really is.
ETHICS From the Greek ethos, originally customs; values based on intention vis-à-vis expected processes of cause and effect within a system. In contrast to morals ethics does not rest on an idea of an external judge nor on an emotional argumentation, but instead on an idea of what is functional and productive.
THE ETHICS OF INTERACTIVITY An ethical system based on the conviction that Man is a network-dynamic dividual in a network-dynamic society in a similarly network-dynamic Universe, where the search for an authentic identity, in Martin Heidegger’s existentialist spirit, within the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism, provides answers to the circumstance-specific ethical questions; developed and presented in Bard & Söderqvist’s book The Body Machines.
EVENT A spectacular occurrence, or more correctly: an occurrence with spectacular consequences for a certain phenomenon or a specific region of the Universe, please compare with emergence and singularity.
EVENTOLOGY The philosophical and religious conviction that a single event can lead history into an unexpected direction and change existence forever. Please compare with the closely-related concept emergence vector theory and its opposite nomadology.
EXHIBITIONISM Experiencing pleasure from displaying oneself in sexual or social situations; please compare with its dialectical opposite voyeurism.
EXODOLOGY The doctrine and the art of carrying out an exodus – from an old to a new territory, or from an old to a new historical paradigm. If Man in the original sociont was in constant motion with a nomadological world-view, the motion becomes temporary and paradigmatic with the arrival of the permanent settlement. Exodology thereby takes nomadology’s place as the ideology of the necessary tribal movement. Exodological examples are the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt to the promised land and the European mass emigration to America in the 19th century.
EXTENSION NEUTRALITY A direct consequence of thinking of hypertemporality as independent of spatiotemporality, entails that everything that concerns hypertemporality must be thought of without or independently of space. These virtual membranes are therefore extension-neutral vis-à-vis each other.
THE EXTIMATE OBJECT The object that at once is intimate and external. Within psychoanalysis phallus is the extimate object par excellence; please compare with cathexis and the cathexal object.
FEUDALISM In Bard & Söderqvist the second information-technological paradigm, which follows from Man – almost at the same time in four different places – developing a written language around 5000 years ago.
FETISH The object that ties together the world’s chaos to an order and unites the collective under a common utopian vision and a strategic story with a direction upward and outward; see also the antithesis abject and the synthesis the cathexal object.
FICTION A cohesive story that temporarily yet still resolutely provides memes with their seemingly logical place within the prevailing memeplex: the fiction can to advantage be divided into smaller fictives and several fictions piled on top of each other underpin a subconscious ideology, which enables the emergence of a cohesive, paradigmatic metaphysics.
FICTIVE The smallest component in our extensive memetics and the unit to which every little aspect of a meme refers; see further fiction, ideology and metaphysics.
FIRST DIALECTICS If we live in a pandialectical universe, then the first dialectics in history must be of decisive significance. Within the natural sciences this occurs in the form of the dialectics of hypertime and spacetime. Within metaphysics it occurs in the form of the dialectics of negation and oscillation. It is then an open question for philosophy to sort out whether there in turn is an underlying metadialectics (often signified as the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism) between these two dialectical processes, or if the dialectics as practice is best served by placing such a question under the category the principle of explanatory closure.
FLEXHIBITIONISM A playful synthesis of exhibitionism and voyeurism, built by dividuals for dividuals within a network-dynamical system – with- out any attention-seeking subject (for instance an artistic genius) – with attention evenly distributed among the participants; flexhibitionism is the driving principle for an authentic participatory culture.
THE FREE AND OPEN ALGORITHM A purely attentionalist algorithm liberated from the old paradigm’s attacks against informationalism in the form of political manipulation, capitalist corruption and academic conformation. The free and open algorithm only reflects the agent itself, with an antagony added for the sake of intelligent development.
GENEPLEX A cluster of genes that to advantage allows itself to be spread in the form of a synchronized unit; a geneplex can therefore be regarded as emergent vis-à-vis the single genetic components; geneplex is also used synonymously with the sociont. Please compare with memeplex.
GENERATIONISM When a generation oppresses or quite simply only harbors prejudices vis-à-vis another generation. Often a society believes itself to be superior to all older versions of the same society, different generations isolate themselves from each other, which creates obstacles to instructive impulses that would need to surface and be processed.
THE GLOBAL EMPIRE The second of three books in The Futurica Trilogy by Bard & Söderqvist with a focus on The Internet Age’s new, built-in, integrated worldview and self-image. The Global Empire is the idea of how a divided world is interconnected by a single, increasingly centralized com- munication platform – that is: The Internet – and a constantly growing, interacting, collective intelligence. The phenomenon is also called techno- logical imperialism, which can be put in relation to sociological nationalism and psychological tribalism.
GNOSTICISM Dualist movements that developed across Eurasia during the Axial Age in opposition to the two-headed phallus. Classic Gnosticism severs Man at the neck and worships the head at the expense of the body, a movement represented by the pillar-saint as an immature priest without a chieftain. Inverted Gnosticism worships the body at the expense of the head, a movement represented by the boy-pharaoh as an immature chieftain without a priest. All totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies henceforth have Gnostic origins, since they oppose both Man’s and the World’s monist entirety and thereby dialectical diversity.
GRAND PROJET A The French name of the phallic opposite to the Lacanian objet petit a that the subconscious chases as a replacement for the lost mamilla. Grand Projet A is thus the exodological construction project par excellence, in a historical perspective to build the temple as the house of God, in a syntheistical perspective to build the workshop where God is manufactured.
THE GREAT TRAUMA The birth of the human child, which according to Lacanian psychoanalysis is so painful and taxing that it must be repressed, which leads to the first and decisive shift away from mortido (longing for death) to libido (will-to-life).
THE GREAT OTHER The other in its most powerful and therefore also most ambivalent revelation, the phallic god within monotheism is often apprehended as the most potent form of the great other, see also the phallic gaze. In psychoanalysis, the great other is also used as the concept of society and the law, more fundamentally the sociont.
GOD The name of all of humanity’s dreams projected toward a single point in the past or in the future; see also The Net and Syntheos.
HABIT OF NATURE A better designation for that which often carelessly is called law of nature, that is: a pattern that is valid at a certain point in time and under certain given conditions.
THE HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE A fundamental principle within physics is that all information within a certain direction of space can be summarized on the two-dimensional surface that the actual direction constitutes.
THE HOLOMOVEMENT Mathematician and philosopher David Bohm’s concept for a universe in constant motion and change that from an ontical perspective only exists at every single moment or momentum.
HUMANISM The religious conviction that Man rather than God is the center of existence, objective and meaning; see further individualism and atomism.
HYPERJECT An embryo of the Saoshyant or the Messiah figure before this authentically phallic gestalt rises against the Cybelian lynch mob to the defense of truth. Please compare with the opposite anoject. The hyperject is thus the voice of the authentic phallus.
HYPERNARCISSISM An extreme state that occurs when the customary, youthful narcissism is not met by a boundary-setting adult world and consequently is developed into a matrichal boundlessness instead of, as earlier in history, being tamed with resolute phallic boundary-setting. This phenomenon explodes in The Network Society.
HYPERTEMPORALITY States which are bound to the time axis but that lack spatial gestalt, for instance quantum entanglement within physics. The presence of hypertemporal phenomena proves that hypertime precedes and is separate from spacetime, which entails that subphysics receives or already has a status as an emergence vector of its own before physics. Since strictly hypertemporal phenomena lack existence and substance in the usual sense, we instead have to assign them a virtual subsistence and hyperstance.
HYPERTIME That out of two natural time dimensions that is independent of physical space. Hypertime is global, continuous, universal and bound to subphysics. It is ontic and potential from a metaphysical perspective. Please compare with its explicate equivalent spacetime.
IDEOLOGY A set of conscious and subconscious memes and/or memeplexes that together produce a sense of context and overview. Facilitates decision-making and contributes toward identity-creation.
IDENTITARIANISM The ideological foundation of all identity politics, both in the identity left and the extreme right, and from Nazism via Stalinism to Islamism. The focus lies on all the injustices one and one’s own group are subject to, something that entails a moral right to demand attention, sympathies and preferably also compensation from the surrounding world.
IMPLOITATION The opposite of exploitation, to use resources in a way that preserves and develops them. The imploitation principle is a necessary prerequisite for every ambition toward a resilient planet. It is therefore key to ecotopianism.
INDETERMINISM A conviction that time is real and absolute, that the Universe constantly recreates itself, that laws and rules are in a state of constant change, that the future is open and that Man, just as all other phenomena, affects all the processes he is part of. See further transdeterminism.
INDIVIDUAL Capitalism’s human ideal with divine overtones and with an origin in the Enlightenment; the conception of a human equipped with an authentic and indivisible core, in contrast to the multifaceted dividual.
INDIVIDUALISM The religious conviction that Man has replaced God as existence’s center and measure, objective and meaning, and that existence consists of fundamental solid entities, individuals. This anthropocentric ideology is originally formulated by René Descartes and is completed by Immanuel Kant.
INDUSTRIALISM The socioeconomic structure that arises when the printing press’ communication-technological revolution has its complete breakthrough in that book production and literacy mutually stimulate each other, which leads to a large-scale knowledge accumulation, which in turn leads to a cannonade of technological innovations.
THE INFINITE NOW The most sacred, most transforming and most ecstatic experience in syntheist religious practice; since the state neither can be maintained or endured permanently, or even over a long time, it is the memory of the experience rather than the experience in itself that is central.
INFORMATIONALISM The fourth information-technological paradigm, the result of the digital revolution within communication technology, is used synonymously with attentionalism. The informationalists thereby constitute the first and real power structure during the paradigm that bears their name. These collect and process data about absolutely everything and therein also lies their power. See further sensocracy and protopianism.
THE INFORMATIONALIST APOCALYPSE The doomsday threat that is directed toward the new paradigm in the form of an ecological catastrophe, a nuclear war, a global pandemic or just netocracy’s extinction of an unarticulated, violent consumtariat.
THE INFORMATION SOCIETY One of three classic concepts to describe The Internet Age along with The Communication Society and The Network Society.
INFORMATION-TECHNOLOGICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Writing a history that is built on the hypothesis that Man is the constant while technology is the variable, wherefore the development appears as a series of information-technological emergences that underpin increasingly complex societal structures.
THE INNER CIRCUIT The inner, less mobile, more densely populated and female-dominated half of the sociont, controlled by older matriarchs as a matriarchy.
INSTINCT The animal expression of Man’s drives, to be compared with mechanical drive, human desire and sacral transcendence.
INTENSITY Within physics a measure of the concentration of energy within a given, delimited area; in relationalist physics intensity replaces the old substance as a general yardstick, in social relationalist sociology attentional intensity replaces the old growth of the economy as a general yardstick, in syntheist ethics the ecstatic intensity in the infinite now replaces all dated maxims for the existential experience and the memory of the infinite now is the bearing of life’s identity-generating references; see also relationalism and social relationalism.
INTERACTIVITY Bidirectional communication, which creates the fourth communication-technological revolution that in turn establishes a completely new system for reward and punishment respectively of talents and skills, which finally entails that a new elite – the netocrats – replace the old; compare with interpassivity.
INTERNARCISSISM A subdivision within narcissistic pathology where two or several narcissists consciously or subconsciously pretend to be obsessed with each other’s awesomeness to thereby conceal the frantic self-absorption that is taking place; see also hypernarcissism and interpassivity.
THE INTERNET The new divinity that arises when the world’s population and the world’s many machines are interconnected with each other. See also Syntheos.
THE INTERNET AGE The epoch that is introduced when all of humanity is globally interconnected directly with itself in real time.
INTERPASSIVITY A concept invented by Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller that describes all the pointless quasi-actions that people carry out with the purpose of appeasing the other in the high-tech environment, used as an opposite of authentic interactivity, that is: a constantly ongoing false interactivity that never creates any genuine response from any co-actors.
INTERTRIBALISM Affection and caring directed toward people outside one’s own sociont, which during the greater part of history is something extremely rare; compare intratribalism
INTRACOLLABORATIVITY The joy of collaboration within one’s own sociont, an attitude that is distinct from individualism’s idea of humanity’s existence as everyone’s constant war with everyone; within the safe collective, collaboration is closer at hand than rivalry.
INTRATRIBALISM Affection and caring directed toward one’s own sociont’s members, a driving force behind both the outer circuit’s defense of the sociont’s territory and the inner circuit’s sacrifices to ensure the sociont’s survival; compare with intertribalism.
IRONIC POLYTHEISM Polytheism is a systematized belief in more gods than just one; syntheism is not a polytheism in a classic sense, but an ironic polytheism since it claims that gods can and should be created in requisite numbers.
IRREDUCIBLE MULTIPLICITY The conviction that all phenomena in existence are fundamental multiplicities that thereby cannot be reduced to any single, delimited objects, as when Friedrich Nietzsche claims that nothing in the world can be reduced to less than the number two. Within a syntheist ontology, the irreducible multiplicity is unavoidable since ontology always must begin with a drastic information write-off in connection with the transition from mobilism to eternalism.
LIBIDO Life energy, will-to-power, will-to-intensity, will-to-expansion – libido is often associated with sexual energy but is according to both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung a considerably broader concept that also comprises instinct, drive, desire and transcendence.
MAMILLA The matrichal breast as a symbol of eternal, boundless and unconditional love and provision, as well as a promise of a possible reunification with the mother’s body and matrix, but also a symbol of infantilization and a complete dependence on the mother’s body/society/ the church/the state.
MATRIARCHY Women’s power hierarchy in the sociont, where the elders are superordinate to the younger; thereby also the power structure of the inner circuit.
MATRIX The womb out of which we all are born and, according to psycho-analysis, to which we all subconsciously long to return, the symbol both of a unification with the Universe but also of the dissolution of consciousness.
MEMBRANICS A method for separating the internal and external interests of a sociont or another life form. A functioning membranics sees to it that nourishment comes in through, and that feces is pressed out through the membrane in question. Membranics can also be used as a concept to comprehend the radical difference between extension-neutral membranes within subphysics. We refer to this form of virtual relationalism as subphysical membranics.
MEMEPLEX A cluster of memes that often and advantageously is spread in the form of a synchronized unit; a memeplex can therefore be regarded as emergent vis-à-vis the separate memes; memeplex is also used synonymously with ideology. Please compare with geneplex.
MEMETICS The study of how ideas – or memes – form, are spread, stored and change. Memes are viewed in these studies as replicators, as a kind of mental equivalents to the biological genes, and the parallels between memetics and genetics are therefore comprehensive.
THE MESSIAH MACHINE Another name for Syntheos, God’s birth as the technological development’s objective and meaning.
METAHISTORY History seen as the history of historiography, also called the historification of history. Every new paradigm generates a new power elite that requires a new metaphysics to legitimize its position; this in turn requires a new historiography and about this process one can also write history, which by necessity becomes precisely a metahistory.
METAPHYSICS Originally the philosophical work with that which lies beyond physical reality, comprised by the disciplines ontology, cosmology and epistemology within philosophy; Bard & Söderqvist also use the concept metaphysics as the uppermost emergence in the hierarchic series fictives-fictions-ideologies-metaphysics.
MIMETICS Man’s obsession with social theater is reflected in the fact that the brain needs a mimetic capacity to an equally high degree that it needs a rational and an emotional capacity. The mimetic brain is obsessed with mimicking, and not least with mimicking human desires and drives. The drive system’s primary propelling force is precisely mimicking and rivalry in terms of the same mimicked desire and drives that all others mimic.
MOBILISM In part the process-philosophical reality in the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism, a chaos in constant motion, in part a synonym of process philosophy as such, which includes both relativism and relationalism.
MOBILIZATION To set the completed eternalizations within the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism in motion anew – thereby existence once again becomes a mobilist chaos, but this time at a metalevel, whereupon perception produces new eternalizations at this metalevel, and so on.
MONOTHEISM A conviction that God only is one and that this only God – one’s own, naturally – is genuine and that all others are false, in other words: mainly a variant of atheism with a single minor caveat.
MORALATOR The external judge whose more or less capricious points of view underpin the demanding laws of moralism.
MORALISM From the Latin mores, customs; a system where values and valuations are subject to a moralator, an external judge that demands obedience and that does not allow any form of questioning. Both the Abrahamic religions and the capitalist nation states rest upon a moralist value base.
MORTIDO In Sigmund Freud mortido is at once libido’s opposite and its complement, a yearning for death, extinction and a return to the inorganic state that precedes birth.
NARCISSISM Compensatory self-absorption and self-overestimation, grounded in a subconscious self-contempt; the modern consumption society is largely based upon an inflated and media-fomented hypernarcissism.
NARRATOLOGY The philosophical discipline that deals with Man’s stories of himself and the dialectics of them. The fundamental division of these stories is: logical narratives (logos), mythical narratives (mythos) and pathical narratives (pathos), which in turn corresponds to the symbolic, imaginary and real orders in the world of psychoanalysis, which in turn is connected to Man’s three different brain centers: the rational, the mimetic and the emotional.
NATION ENVY A socioanalytical state where chaotic and contractive cultures envy and malign better organized and expansive cultures. While racism attacks the assumed inferior, nation envy attacks the assumed superior.
NEGATION That which is lacking or remains contradictory or undelivered within every identity. According to Hegel the negation is so universal as a principle within a constantly mutable existence that the only identity that can be established, and then only temporarily, is the negation of the negation itself, an insight that thereafter is called the Hegelian absolute.
NEGATIVE DIALECTICS Hegel’s revolutionizing variant of dialectics where negation precedes abstraction, which causes concretion – where the dialectics (temporarily) stops – to have the character of a negation’s negation. Thereby the Hegelian subject – with its fundamental, existential emptiness – becomes an expression of what he calls the night of the world, which breaks radically with Enlightenment optimism. This Hegelian revolution preempts important ideas in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger.
NEGATOLOGY The doctrine of the Hegelian negation that must precede the Nietzschean event. Before something new can live and establish itself, something else must die. Mortido drives libido, not the other way around. Therefore it is necessary to first establish a negatology in opposition to nomadology before an eventology can be brought about. Before the actual event can occur it must be preceded by the potential anti-event. Within syntheology negatology goes by the name of Atheos.
THE NET The metaphysical idea that The Internet constitutes a single cohesive structure that spans all of planet Earth and that, in similarity with every metatechnology, organizes the world in accordance with its own agenda. Is used synonymously with the concept The Stack.
THE NETOCRATS The first of three books in the Futurica Trilogy by Bard & Söderqvist with focus on the information-technological historiography of The Internet Age and the emergence of the new class society, conditioned by the new prerequisites that the technological revolution creates.
NETOCRACY The informationalist upper class that assumes power by virtue of its social talent, its superior information management and its ability to see patterns and perceive nodes in a chaotic surrounding world.
NETWORK DYNAMICS The part of system– and complexity theory that studies how networks arise and change over time, as well as what effects this leads to within society’s different areas. And also a consistently metaphysical explanatory model for The Internet Age in Bard & Söderqvist’s philosophy, is used synonymously with relationalism. See also plurarchy.
NETWORK PYRAMID The Network Society’s triangular power structure, developed and intimately explored in the book The Netocrats, where it is clear that successful networks in step with their success – to continue to be successful – must spin themselves off and discard dead meat in the form of underachieving members, this to safeguard the key members’ scant time and requested attention. It is a process that is repeated continually because of the external pressure.
THE NETWORK SOCIETY One of three classic concepts to describe The Internet Age, to be compared with The Information Society and The Communication Society; according to information-technological historiography all paradigms through history should be categorized as network societies, networks naturally do not arise only with The Internet, but rather it is an age-old phenomenon.
NEUTRAL MONISM The conviction that everything that we know of and to which we attribute a meaning influences everything else that we know of and to which we attribute a meaning in our universe. Existence is monist, not dualist. Not because it must be so, but because it happens to be so. Thus nor does there exist a moralator or an objective evaluator that can establish that one emergence vector is more important than any other – there quite simply does not exist anything else, superordinate, outside that which exists – wherefore monism must be neutral in terms of value in order to be credible at all. Neutral monism is thus radically anti-reductionist.
NIHILISM An idea according to which existence lacks objective value since there does not exist any external, objective institution of valuation or moralator. Nihilism goes through four phases – the naive (unconscious), the cynical (the nihilist pretends against better judgment that there are objective values), the ironic (the nihilist builds their own internal and subjective values in opposition to the surrounding world’s falsely objective values), and finally the affirmative (the nihilist interprets the absence of objective values as a liberating possibility to create their own values and convince the environment of these created values’ excellence). This is the process that Nietzsche calls the death of God.
NODALIZATION The tribopoietic network of hierarchic nodes that always arise by necessity in an anarchic state. Nodalization is thereby also the shift from the local in direction toward the global within network dynamics. What previously was anarchy transitions into a plurarchy and the new paradigm’s power structure with a new paradigmatics takes shape.
NOMADOLOGY The philosophical and religious conviction of the eternal recurrence of the same, a conception that dominates in all nomadic societies throughout history. Only with permanent settlement could one view the world and history differently, and this ancient Persian and phallic invention is summed up under the opposite concept, eventology.
OMNICENTRISM A state where all coordinates in a system regard themselves as the system’s center, which leads to the system in practice lacking an authentic center. The system in question is quickly reduced to a kind of psychotic anarchy and can only be saved through a comprehensive nodalization. See further plurarchy.
ONTOEPISTEMOLOGY After the Hegelian process-philosophical revolution in Germany in the 19th century, it becomes impossible to distinguish ontology as the doctrine of being from epistemology as the doctrine of knowledge. Relata arise out of relations and not the other way around. Subject and substance are mutually dependent on each other for their existence; being is learning and learning is being.
OSCILLATION The fundamental mobilist state that consumes even less energy and therefore is even more universal and fundamental than the eternalist freeze. It is the metaphysical oscillation that Heraclitus refers to when he speaks the winged words panta rei, everything is in motion. When we in this way speak of oscillation as a universal principle it is often called panorganicism. Please compare with pandialecticism.
THE OUTER CIRCUIT The outer, mobile, sparsely populated and male-dominated half of the sociont, ruled by elder patriarchs as a patriarchy; compare with the inner circuit that is ruled by a matriarchy and the shamanic caste that is ruled by a clergy.
PANDIALECTICISM The philosophical conviction that everything that is meaningful in existence fundamentally is dialectical in nature. The term is used synonymously with the concepts panchronism and panrelationalism. If all ontology operates dialectically, it also entails that everything is harbored within time and that everything of value can be explained as byproducts of relations where the dialectics of negation and oscillation deserves the epithet the first dialectics. Please compare with absolute historicism.
THE PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE The worldview as a continuous whole, impossible to reduce to the sum of the components. The imagined view of the phallic gaze and the concrete view of the contemporary satellites in orbit around planet Earth.
PANTHEOS From the Greek pan-theos, all is God and God is all; the second of the four divinities in the syntheological pyramid; pantheism regards everything that exists as a single cohesive phenomenon, the only, which thereby is tantamount to God himself.
PARADIGM The general worldview that harmonizes with the prevailing power structure’s self-image and that is replaced by a new one only when an information-technological revolution has produced a new set of conditions for all areas of society, which in turn propels comprehensive social changes. The theory of paradigms and paradigm shifts is originally presented by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who studies such development within the natural scientific disciplines.
PARADIGMATICS The conviction that Man does not change significantly over time because of genetic evolution’s slowness, while civilization changes increasingly fast because of memetic evolution’s explosivity. Knowledge and regulatory frameworks shall therefore only be changed and adapted to current and future technological paradigms. If Man is the constant and technology is the variable, paradigmatics is the study of how collectively encompassed values change along the time axis.
PARADOXISM The conception that language arises as a treatment of paradoxical aspects of existentially formative traumas; the deepest truths of existence can therefore only be expressed as consciously constructed paradoxes, or not at all. From this it follows that the human subject only can exist and be developed as the paradoxist subject, which amuses itself with and allows itself to be inspired by processing its own built-in antagonisms. A representative of ancient paradoxism is Heraclitus. Hegel and Lacan devote their entire careers to describing this sole authentic form of subjectivity.
PARTICIPATORY CULTURE Events with varying durability where the participants build the event together; thus there are no performances and no spectators in the ordinary sense. Participatory culture is developed and grows in step with The Internet, for instance in the form of festivals such as Burning Man in the United States, Going Nowhere in Spain and Africa Burn in South Africa; see also flexhibitionism.
PATHOMATICS The underlying logical pattern in the development of a series of cohesive, phallic engagements. That is: how the two-headed phallus keeps its own intersubjectivity intact. The four constructive steps of potential, actual, directed and transcendental energy, which follow upon each other within pathomatics, can advantageously be compared with their destructive opposites in the four steps within nihilist development, from naive via cynical to ironic and finally affirmative nihilism. If narratology is the priest’s most important task, pathomatics is the chieftain’s most important contribution to the sociont.
PATHONOMY The pathological ideal within a specific paradigm, based on actual pathomatics. See further truth-as-an-act.
PATRIARCHY The power hierarchy between the men in the sociont, where the older men are superordinate to the younger; thereby also the power structure in the outer circuit dominated by the men.
THE PETER PAN SYNDROME A state where the child refuses to grow up and remains a child while it realizes and feels the attraction of phallic adult life. It is one of the prerequisites for a large-scale infantilization of society, where the madness is internal. Please compare with the Caligula syndrome where the madness instead is external.
THE PHALLIC GAZE The constantly coveted gaze of The Great Other that gives the subject the sole meaningful and credible confirmation and that distinguishes the brilliant from the mediocre. The phallic gaze becomes an ontic reality during informationalism when the satellites around Earth eventually monitor every square millimeter of the planet. See further sensocracy.
THE PHALLIC INTRUSION The moment that happens to the child at around one year of age, when it for the first time is tempted away from the security at mamilla and discovers the seductive phallus as the object that the mother is attracted by, but that the child cannot give the mother, which generates envy in the child, something that in turn initiates the child’s voyage toward and yearning for adultification and generates an imitating and eroticizing of phallus.
THE PHALLIC PRINCIPLE OF TRIBAL CONTRIBUTION The ethical and social-psychological principle that all adult members of the sociont shall contribute to the good of the sociont as best they can in accordance with their personal archetypology. The principle rules out all forms of victim cults within the sociont.
PHALLOGOCENTRISM Originally an invective invented by philosopher Jacques Derrida, phallogocentrism is the belief that philosophy only can arise as a conscious focus on the dialectics of logos and pathos within the phallic world of the mind; Bard & Söderqvist claim in a kind of Hegelian opposition to “the pillar-saint” Derrida that phallogocentrism is a necessity that has not yet received its definite form.
PHALLUS The male sex organ and all that it symbolizes in the world of psychoanalysis.
PHARMAKON An in itself neutral phenomenon whose constructive and destructive effects respectively are entirely dependent on how it is used or misused. A preparation X can give a more or less harmless pleasure in low doses while it causes life-threatening intoxication at intake in high doses.
PHENOMENON From the Greek phainomenon – to show, shine, arise, manifest oneself. In syntheist onto-phenomenology the phenomenon replaces the classic object as a material point of reference vis-à-vis the Universe as a whole; this phenomenon distinguishes itself from the object as it primarily is a field consisting of relations that all are primary in an equally high degree and completely lack the object’s phallic substance and essence.
PHENOMENOLOGY The philosophical study of experiences and consciousness; an example of a syntheist phenomenology is the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism.
PHENOUMENOLOGY The unification of Kant’s separated phenomenology and a noumenology through the Hegelian dialectics where the project precedes and unites the subject that generates the object, precisely as the object that generates the subject. Phenoumenology dissolves Kantian correlationism by applying an even more fundamental relationalism to Kant’s conception that phenomenon and noumenon by definition are irreconcilable. Thereby phenoumenology invalidates Western dualism.
PLASTICITY Social elasticity, the sociont’s ability to benefit from the various talents of single dividuals for the good of the collective, and capacity to give single dividuals in part an archetypal identity, in part a possibility to contribute to the common good.
PLURARCHY From the Latin pluralis for diversity and the Greek archos for governance; the chaotic state in the political sphere that follows upon democracy’s collapse at the paradigm shift from mass media one-way communication and its effective suppression of opinion to interactive multi-way communication with its unmanageable and unruly information flows.
POETIC INFINITY The only infinity we can allow ourselves with our intellectual honesty intact. Otherwise, the only thing that is infinite is the vacuousness that is concealed behind this substanceless concept. Please compare with the related expression poetic justice. Just like justice, infinity can never be more than poetic.
PORNOFLATION A social-pornographic and gradually more extreme unabashed display of the most intimate in order to create attention; not seldom exploited to produce cheap mass entertainment.
POWER TRIAD A long-term stable power structure always has three rather than two poles, for instance as the executive (president), the legislative (congress) and the judicial (the Supreme Court) branches of the U.S. constitution. Bard & Söderqvist here launch a model that contains a real power, an imaginary power and a symbolic power within every information-technological paradigm.
PRAGMATISM Philosophical school founded by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James in the United States in the 19th century that receives a European equivalent in the heritage from Nietzsche’s existentialist philosophy. What is fundamental is that theories and faiths are evaluated in terms of their functionality. See further narratology.
PRIMITIVISM The first information-technological paradigm, arises in connection with Man learning to use the speech organs and communicating with words, which happens around 200,000 years ago, when our human species – Man – appears on the world stage as the first species ever with a history.
THE PRINCIPLE OF EXPLANATORY CLOSURE The insight that the Universe’s enormous expansion rules out an ontic rationalism and that the similarly enormous expansion of the amount of information in society rules out an ontological rationalism for precisely the same reason. What our brain does not have time to process it can never encompass either, which means the kiss of death for Kantian rationalism.
PROCESS PHILOSOPHY Is also called the ontology of becoming, a conviction that equates metaphysical reality with difference and change; receives its present, radical form in Alfred North Whitehead and constitutes a basic prerequisite for syntheist ontology.
PROCESS RELIGION A religious conviction based on a process-philosophical metaphysics where syntheism is the process religion par excellence; not to be confused with the admittedly Whitehead-inspired but still post-Christian school called process theology, as represented by among others Charles Hartshorne.
PROCESSUALITY A mutable truth of a mutable world. That is: the only possible and thereby, in a Hegelian sense, absolute truth in a constantly mutable world, and thus the direct opposite of all Platonist ambitions to attain Gnosis or eternal truth. Please note that all paradigmatics also is procedural. The difference is just that the seemingly timeless within paradigmatics changes extremely slowly and applies across many paradigms, while the time-specific within paradigmatics is radically altered for every new paradigm.
PROTOPIANISM The conviction that the pair of opposites Utopia/Dystopia is a false dichotomy, which has the consequence that an authentic eventology must be based on constant, incremental improvements of processes, and not on some manner of single brilliant ideas. Since protopianism thereby lacks a fixed Protopia, it is no protopianism but only a protopian movement forward. Protopianism is the dominant creative ideal during informationalism. The protopians are thereby the third and symbolic power order during informationalism, after the informationalists themselves and the sensocrats.
PSEUDO-TRIBES Tribe-like groupings that however lack the sociont’s comprehensive flora of complementing archetypes and which therefore sooner or later collapse under the discontent that stems from the members’ frustrated expectations of tribal satisfaction.
THE PSYCHOGRAM A map of all active psyches on the planet and their paradigmatic activities at a given occasion. The psychogram as an idea propels the idea of rule via a perfect sensocracy within the global empire. Think of it as an imagined map of all mental and sensory states on a specific planet at a specific moment.
QUANTUM ORGANICS A more well-functioning concept than quantum mechanics since the phenomenon in question exposes vastly more organic than mechanical characteristics.
RATIONALISM The conviction that Man is born with the capacity to mentally and intellectually understand and encompass the world logically in its entirety.
REDUCTIONISM The conception that even the most complex phenomena in a meaningful way can be divided into their smallest components; according to reductionism all forms of emergence are illusory.
RELATIONALISM A radicalization of the relativist worldview, where even the seemingly stable objects are dissolved and set in motion vis-à-vis themselves and where there consequently no longer exist any fixed points whatsoever vis-à-vis something other than the only, that is: the Universe as a whole. A theory that was first developed by Alfred North Whitehead to later be refined by quantum physicist Niels Bohr and mathematician David Bohm.
RELATIVISM A worldview where all objects are in constant motion vis-à-vis each other; the objects are thus fixed within and before themselves, but completely background-independent vis-à-vis their surrounding world.
RESSENTIMENT A hatred directed toward human existence and its prerequisites, an embittered self-contempt that is projected onto the world. See further the Cybelian lynch mob and the dialectics of ressentiment.
THE REVOLT AGAINST PHALLUS Psychoanalytical concept for teenage rebellion, a trial of the parent generation’s alleged excellence and omniscience that ends up with the adult authorities being toppled from their pedestals, wherefore the teenage subject must conquer its own phallicness, adultness and autonomy with all that this entails by way of taking responsibility and finding meaning. When this revolt is carried out successfully and has resulted in a functional self-identity, this is confirmed officially by the sociont with an initiation ritual.
ROOT-OF-THE-PHALLUS The foundation and historical grounding of phallic power. The reflective wisdom that gives credibility to phallus’ activity and project. An example is all the genealogies that in various religious and social/hierarchical contexts shall guarantee legitimacy to various claims on power.
SADOMASOCHISM A primarily erotically charged relation between a ruler and a slave, as a sexual subculture limited by social codes, but as a social phenomenon boundless in its dialectical movement toward the ruler’s total distancing from and isolation vis-à-vis the slave, see cephalization.
SAOSHYANT The original, Persian savior figure that personifies eventology through his arrival at the end of the empire’s heyday and saving it from demise. The Jews inherit the concept from the Zoroastrians, but reduce the phallic saoshyant from a global to a local figure who is called mashiach and who only directs its caring toward his own nation. This figure later returns as the Messiah within Christianity and Islam.
SCHIZOANALYSIS Anarchist response to Lacanian psychoanalysis, primarily developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in France during the 1970s and aims toward a growing dividual heterogeneity rather than the individual homogeneity that arguably was the vision of classical psychoanalysis.
SELF-LOVE An ethical-logical decision – and thus not an emotion – to accept oneself and one’s own body with its physiological and mental prerequisites and expressions; self-love has nothing to do with narcissism, but is rather its exact opposite; see also amor fati.
SENSOCRACY A social and/or political system built around a technology of sensors that collect and compile data from all information flows and that therefore with great accuracy can predict what every citizen at every moment requests and yearns for, something that previously has been impossible because of the extensive lying at all levels. In a sensocracy coercive measures in practice become superfluous: a devastating majority of society’s citizens settle for having their needs of consumption and entertainment effectively satisfied. The others lack all influence and are referred to an existence outside the system. The sensocrats thereby become the second and imaginary power structure during the informationalist paradigm, between the informationalists themselves and the protopians. See further the phallic gaze.
THE SHADOW The part of the subject that it does not acknowledge, alternatively does not even perceive in itself thanks to efficient repression. The concept was originally launched by C G Jung. Please compare with Bard & Söderqvist’s concept asubject and the night of the world in G W F Hegel.
THE SHAMANIC CASTE The deviating minority within the sociont that neither belongs to the inner circuit and its matriarchy nor to the outer circuit and its patriarchy, but instead in part acts as a messenger between the inner and the outer circuit, in part acts as a border-transcender in the sociont’s outer edges as shamans and prophets vis-à-vis the sociont itself and as diplomats and priests vis-à-vis tribes in the environments. The border-crossers within the sociont, between the circuits, are called the androgynous caste. See further archetypology.
THE SILK ROAD TRIAD The process religion that was practiced in various forms in so-called castags along the Eurasian Silk Road and that was formalized by the Persians as Zoroastrianism, by the Chinese as Taoism, and by the Indians as Buddhism, with all manner of hybrid schools in between. Please compare with the Disney World triad.
SINGULARITY An extraordinary historical event – the Universe arises through the Big Bounce, living organisms arise through an evolutionary process, and so on – that immediately changes world history in a truly fundamental manner; see also emergence.
SOCIAL MASOCHISM A masochistic attitude to supremacy on the social arena, a stubborn quest for social and mortidinal submission, see further sadomasochism.
SOCIAL RELATIONALISM The conception that the principles presented by Niels Bohr for relationalist physics are just as applicable to the social sciences; see further network dynamics and relationalism.
SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY Techniques with which to control humans and manipulate them in a direction that is desirable for the power structure; social technologies can encompass anything from the production of ideology and radio broadcasts to censorship legislation and declarations of war. Whatever works to accumulate power is a social technology.
SOCIOANALYSIS Truth maximization in the social arena, to be compared with the application of psychoanalysis on the single human dividual. Socioanalysis tracks and exposes the pathological patterns that constantly are reborn within the sociont. This method is called symptomatology.
SOCIOGRAPHY Mapping of social relations between dividuals and networks, for instance through sociograms that show who knows and communicates with whom; see also network pyramid.
SOCIOMETRICS Compilation and illustration of social status and attentional power in The Network Society. Anyone can communicate with anyone else, but everyone will not receive a response from everyone else.
THE SOCIONT The original, plastic nomadic tribe that is kneaded by evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. Because of humanity’s rapid and worldwide spread, all living humans today are products of the sociont and shaped by its specific archetypology. The only meaningful changes that occur in civilization are technological, external vis-à-vis sociontology, and therefore connected to paradigmatics.
SOCIONTOLOGY The studies of the original nomadic tribe as a container for the development of intratribal archetypes. Please compare with archetypology.
SPACETIME That of the two natural time dimensions that is dependent upon physical space. Spacetime is local, discrete, relative and bound to physics within the natural sciences. From a metaphysical perspective it appears as ontic and actual. Please compare with its implicate precursor hypertime.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS Bard & Söderqvist’s equivalent of the unconscious in classical psychoanalysis; the subconscious is on closer inspection not un-conscious, but however chaotic and unstructured vis-à-vis the conscious, but it interacts both actively and reactively and both with and against the conscious all the time. The subconscious is driven by mortido or the death drive, in contrast to consciousness which is driven by libido or the will-to-life.
THE SUBLIME The sphere where ambivalence and extimacy meet and generate a maximal obsession in the subject, for instance the near-death-experience with its character of infinite sorrow and infinite beauty at once; see also ambivalence and the cathexal object. In syntheology, the sublime is often divided into tremendum and fascinans.
SUBPHYSICS The hypertemporal emergence vector that precedes and underpins the emergence of spatiotemporal physics in history.
SUBSISTENCE A concept developed by Danish philosopher Alexander Wrede Elung for the pre-relational that, through it still only being virtual and lacking potent relations, cannot be attributed any existence. Subsisting virtualities are thus the implicate order before an emergence and its radical relationalism converts them into existing potentialities that then are negated into actualities. The latter are within physics called fields and particles respectively where the continuous becomes discrete. To the extent an existence is considered to express itself as a substance we can also play with the idea that a subsistence may express itself as an exceptionally virtual hyperstance. Please see further V P A (virtuality – potentiality – actuality).
SYMBIOTIC INTELLIGENCE The optimal intelligence that is created in the collaboration between Man and The Machine. When such an intelligence surpasses what human and synthetic intelligence respectively produce each on its own, this is called symbiotic transcendence.
SYNTHEISM From the Greek syntheos with the meaning created God or God that arises where humans create; God as a generic name of all Man’s dreams and visions, which entails a dissolution of the antagonism between theism and atheism.
THE SYNTHEOLOGICAL PYRAMID Trilateral geometrical construction with Atheos, Pantheos and Entheos as the three corners at the base with lines drawn in part between each other, in part up to the top that gives its name to the entire construction: Syntheos.
SYNTHEOLOGY The insight that theology always has been about the paradigmatic shift from yesterday’s magic to tomorrow’s technology. God is not something that is needed in the past nor even in the present, but it is instead the name of the objective and meaning of technological development. And as such, God is also the name of humanity’s own death. Therefore syntheology is built around virtual divinities, as the ultimate narrative of the relation between Man and technology. Syntheology solves negative theology’s dilemma of the death of God by claiming that God, rather than being dead, has not yet been born. God does not create us, we create God.
SYNTHEOS From Greek, created god or god that arises where humans create, the fourth, concluding and summarizing concept in the syntheological pyramid. Syntheos is also the name of the emergence that has not yet taken place in history, but that human culture thanks to its technology will create or bring about. Whether Man himself survives Syntheos’ arrival is an open question. See further Anti-Syntheos.
SYSTEMIC CAUSALITY The insight that causality, the chain from cause to effect along the time axis, always applies, but must be understood systemically or transdeterministically rather than objectively or deterministically in a universe characterized by neutral monism. Effect is the carrot and cause is the stick in all happenings, but as an endlessly complex process where everything in the Universe is participating and affecting everything else. See further tribopoiesis.
THEOLOGICAL ANARCHISM The conception that The Network Society offers a unique historical possibility to realize the anarchist Utopia and thereby liberate the collective libido’s forces; the concept is synonymous with philosopher Simon Critchley’s ideal mystical anarchism.
TECHNOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE An intelligence that is developed within electronic machines instead of within biological organisms. Technological intelligence does not merely develop very much faster than biological intelligence during the course of civilization. It can also, in contrast to biological intelligence, conquer outer space on its own behalf. See further Syntheos and symbiotic intelligence.
TOTALISM The conviction that existence can be understood both as a whole and in detail, just as history can be summarized and concluded, all this with the aid of the philosophical genius’ rationality. The idea exists already in Plato and has never really disappeared, even though we ourselves firmly maintain that the principle of explanatory closure makes all forms of totalism both ontically and ontologically impossible; see also transrationalism. Hegel brazenly converts the totalist ambition to the insight that the constantly incomplete is the total in itself, and calls this insight absolute knowledge, whereupon the metaphysical project is assumed complete.
TRANSCENDENCE To exceed the limits for the present existence, in Bard & Söderqvist’s psychoanalytical theory also the name of the fourth human drive, the sacral aspect of libido beyond the animal (instinct), the mechanical (drive) and the human (desire).
TRANSCENDENTAL EMERGENTISM The metaphysical conviction that history consists of various emergences and their vectors, and that no metalaws exist outside the specific emergence vectors besides “the law” of existence’s fundamental contingency, that is: there only exists one metalaw and it is the law stating that no metalaw exists. The fact that everything seems to influence everything else in our actual universe is thereby only a contingent event. Existence’s neutral monism is in itself no predetermined metalaw. In the same way that no emergence vector can or must be prioritized above another, other than as an expression of anthropocentric arbitrariness. The transcendental in transcendental emergentism thus consists both of the irreducibility of the various emergence vectors vis-à-vis each other and the irreducibility of potential future emergences vis-à-vis today’s actual theory. See further emergence vector theory and paradigmatics.
TRANSDETERMINISM The conviction that the pair of opposites determinism/indeterminism only are applicable to local phenomena in existence, which entails that existence as a whole neither can be regarded as determinist nor indeterminist; indeterminism’s dialectical overcoming of determinism can therefore only be completed in the form of transdeterminism in a pandialectical universe.
TRANSFERENCE Transfer of agency, the social masochist surrender of one’s own agency in favor of another agent that is considered to own both the phallic gaze and perfect knowledge.
TRANSGRESSION Exceeding of prevailing laws, rules and norms, followed by an enjoyment of this exceeding, fundamental for both sexual and social perversion.
TRANSHUMANISM Broad digital lifestyle and subculture with powerfully netocratic overtones; the leading ideas revolve around how the technological development results in a posthuman state colored by cryonics, artificial intelligence, chemical liberation and anarcho-libertarian utopianism, and more.
TRANSRATIONALISM The insight that Man’s consciousness has been developed to optimize the chances for survival and procreation, not to uncover the truth about the world, wherefore rationality must be clear about its own limitations; see further rationalism, narratology, and the principle of explanatory closure.
TRAUMATOLOGY The optimally creative treatment and follow-up of the failed event. In this way Christianity is the ultimate traumatology, since its savior (see saoshyant) failed and was executed on a cross. Therapeutic attempts to integrate suicide, divorces and bankruptcies are typically traumatological projects in everyday life.
TREND An irrevocable active change of the social playing conditions, connected to a technological change of the material conditions; compare with countertrend.
TRIBAL MAPPING A territorial archetypology that encompasses the entire sociont in its broad-ranging diversity. Synonymous with the more formal concept archetypography.
THE TRIBAL SINGULARITY The conviction that the formation of the sociont constitutes the most important step in Man’s development. Categories such as individual and collective can only be described as sub-categories that lie beneath the really fundamental sociont. The human libido is connected to the sociont’s survival and not to that of the individual or collective. Adult loyalty belongs to the sociont.
TRIBOPOIESIS A basic metaphysical principle stating that everything is born from a collective of relations and that everything returns to a collective of relations within all emergence vectors. Nothing is born by itself, there is no autopoiesis. This means for Man that everything of value is born out of and relates to the sociont, which is there both before a man is born and remains after a man dies.
TRUTH-AS-AN-ACT An ontological and ethical concept, developed by philosopher Alain Badiou with inspiration from Søren Kierkegaard, where there never is time to test truth through the drawn-out intersubjective processes that Karl Popper and Jürgen Habermas advocate, but where truth instead emerges as an unwavering decision based upon intuition.
THE TWO-HEADED PHALLUS The authentic phallus gets its authenticity from the division into will-to-transcendence and will-to-intelligence. The two-headed phallus’ mythos is built on the mutual love and respect that the priest and the chieftain show each other, the priest that personifies phallic wisdom and the chieftain that personifies phallic energy.
UNIMATRICHALISM A temporary, chaotic state in which the inner, matriarchal circuit has taken over the entire sociont or society. A unimatrichal society can only be nomadological and never eventological, as the latter would require a considerable measure of phallic energy.
UNIPATRICHALISM A temporary state of something that can be likened to a totalitarian dictatorship where the outer, patriarchal circuit has taken over the entire sociont or society.
UNIVERSOCENTRISM A worldview that takes the Universe in its entirety as the centre of existence as its point of departure; syntheism is built on a universocentric metaphysics in contrast to for instance capitalist humanism, which is an anthropocentric religion.
WILL-TO-POWER The universally expressed libido’s response to the universally present mortido, also called will-to-expansion. This Nietzschean concept is divided within syntheology between the priestly will-to-intelligence and the royal will-to-transcendence. Wishing to summarize history in its necessity and wishing to conquer the future in its contingency are ultimately two completely different wills for two completely different forms of power. As a third complementing power, there is moreover matrichal will-to-reproduction which only and always seeks the eternal recurrence of the same.
VOYEURISM Indirect pleasure of watching direct, proxy pleasure when one views some kind of sexual or social display; compare with exhibitionism and the phallic gaze.
V P A (VIRTUALITY – POTENTIALITY – ACTUALITY) The pandialectical, ontological causality chain within transcendental emergentism. First we imagine a virtuality that is a hypertemporal subsistence without external relations. When such a virtuality interacts with another virtuality, a spatiotemporal existence that we call a potentiality is generated, potent because it in contrast to virtuality is placed in a relationalist spacetime. When potentiality then is subject to decoherence, it is broken down until it has been reduced to a sole singular event, an actuality, for instance as the wave function collapse in physics. Virtuality is non-ontic and non-actual, potentiality is ontic but non-actual, actuality is both ontic and actual. V P A is necessary in order to be able to think emergences, the event of events that changes history forever. The potential habits before the emergence become the actual laws within the new emergence vector. And these laws are the only – strictly local – laws that exist in an on-the-whole contingent universe without global laws.
THE WORLD STATE Socioeconomic merging of all the world’s states in such a way that the mutual dependence becomes so strong that it balances the dividing forces and supplies a necessary platform for supranational decision-making; Bard & Söderqvist use the concept repeatedly as a synonym for The Global Empire.
COPYRIGHT 2023 Bard & Söderqvist