DE-QUANTIFYING HYPERMODERNITY: From Algorithmic Re-Set to Noetic Hyper-Set

Do we really need a new term such as « hypermodernity » to serve as journalistic slogan for the ennui of a society whose lexical narcissism serves to hide that it is just an nth neo-remix, more of the same?

Michael Aaron Kamins, philosopher-poet and author of two collections of poetry dealing with our contemporaneity, ABSENCES (2014) and CLOUDS (2020), is of the opinion that this vocable can serve to name our epoch with no name, an epoch that prefers to name itself indirectly, in terms of letters denoting its component generations (Gen X, Y, and Z).

In a highly compressed overview of his thought, Kamins diagnoses a certain toxicity behind the current confusion of names and movements, as the toxic cloud of CO2 enveloping the planet is relayed and reinforced by toxic digitisation.

The Great Reset is a propaganda mirage covering over the fact that our world is already in a constant movement of disruptive re-set as we tend towards integral digitisation in the Cloud of (Ideological) unknowing.

The current threat is one of destructive integration within an Algorithm capable of reverting the time of life into an anti-entropic parody of creativity that disrupts and destroys everything, including the Earth we live on. Earth itself has become an alien planet surrounded by a toxic cloud of physical and digital poison, and we need to re-terraform it.

For Kamins the liberatory potential of post-modernism was instantly annihilated by its cynical literalisation. The Absolute was freed at last from its metaphysical containers, but this short-lived freedom was annulled by its collapse into concrete reality. A reified absolute, as Kamins’ analysis shows drives us into absolute dependence and absolute addiction.

There is no way to put the Absolute back in a box, not even in the giant box of Terra Calculata. Kamins proposes to move from Re-set to Hyper-set, from digital and biochemical toxicities to noetic vaporicities.

Publicité