James Wiltgen and Robin Mackay
Introdu ction: Cold War/Cold World
A Proje ct of Reason?
The essential point is that in characterizing an episode of Knowing [ .. ] we are
.
placing it in the logical space of reasons. of justifying and being able to justify
what one says.1
The Cold War-as historical event . as scientific-military configuration. as i nter
laced sociological . politica l , and economic phenomeno n-careens between
monotonic and non - monotonic log ics. as the paradig matic instantiation of a
type of 'procadence', a crystalline formation that signals. simultaneously, bot h
Saved! a n d Doomed!2 It also ushers in a type o f Prometheanism o f bot h the
right and the left . i n which the patholog ies unleashed by the vastness of
potential destruction vie w i t h the complexity and com pelling prospects of
potential production : as exemplar. the W h ite House press release of 6 August
1945, following Truman's decision to d rop the fi rst bomb on H i roshima. declares:
It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The
force from which the sun draws its power has bee n loosed ... .
Beginning with the First a nd Second World Wars (deemed by some a ' modern'
30-Years' War) . the Cold War conti nued and intensified a series of cascading
combined and uneven geotrau matic shocks that engulfed the ent i re planet .
with enduring effects of concussion. disequilibriu m , and jarring inquietude. A
drive toward annihilation seemed a n unrelenting element of this Cold War. a
question for detectives of all stripes, as it generated an absurd redundancy
of thermonuclear a rsenals on the part of both the USSR and the USA-in
1.
W. Sellars. Empiricism and the Philosophy of the Mind (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University
Press. 1997). 76. This will in many ways be a stark contrast to the possible sophistry of Octave in The
Rules of the Game. with his comment: 'The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons'.
2.
G. Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time Image, tr. H. Tomlinson and 8. Habberjam ( London and New
York: Continuum) , 89-92.
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effect . why all the guns? But more profoundly, why t he quickening to abject
destruction? One might argue that t h e h u ma n species has always been poised
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on the cusp of ext i nction. but the Cold War supplied a powerful psychological
and technological matrix for this precarity, and i nstigated a temporal urgency
that reanimated certain theolog ical thematics.
Given the existential u ncertainty u n leashed for t hose who lived through
the Cold War, the repercussions of which a re in many ways amplified , relayed,
and replayed in a new form for t hose who must now survive what has been
called the ' Cold World '3-that of tec hnolog ical subjectivation , political malaise,
cultural dysphoria , and ecological crisis-this terrain comprises an experiential
and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage in myriad
forms, a fundamental question: 'W hat will we of make of ourselves? '4
If the term ' Cold World' describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic
capital , and the technological sub l i me. the d read experienced during the Cold
War. when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is in many ways
echoed in the hall of mirrors of Cold World g lobalization, where our collective
consciousness is overtaken by a flood of difference. u ncertainty, and the dread
i ncomputability of this alien yet constructed world . What is our place here, and
how do we even compute the ' we' that we describe ourselves to be?
Cold War/Cold World has bee n imagined i n large measure through a series
of further questions t hat eval u ate and respond to t his fundamental shock
to the system. It examines the task of rendering knowable, representable, or
figurable the looming threats of both Cold War and Cold World-the common
denominators being a distressed attempt to i nquire i nto t he dynamics of a real
that seems in excess over u nderstanding and the means of politics traditionally
conceived . and a concomitant temptation to a ba ndon any i ntel ligent collective
3.
Although in the context of this project we do not restrict the term to any particular formulation.
the primary reference here is of course Dominic Fox' s Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection
and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria (London: Zero Books. 2009). addressed directly in Christine
Wertheim's contribution to the volume.
4.
R. Mackay. ·1mmaterials. Exhibition. Acceleration.' In Y. Hui and A. Broeckmann (eds). 30 Years Les
/mmareriaux: Art. Science. Theory (Wneberg: Meson Press. 2015). 215-44: 240; see also A. Mbembe
on how humans as a species can "begin-from-ourselves'. A. Mbembe. Critique of Black Reason. tr. L.
Dubois (Durham. NC: Duke University Press. 2017), 7; for provocative takes on nuclear weapons, among
the vast literature. see the works of KenzaburO Oe. Susan Sontag. and Arundhati Roy.
engagement in favour of a pragmatics that limits itself to wrestling with local
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contingencies. or an aesthetics mesmerised by a global sublime.
These inquiries reveal and operate within what can be termed a ques
tion-problem complex, an integral approach that might be deemed-in an
appropriation of cultural tropes appropriate to the noir of the Cold War scene-a
type of quasi-ontological detective mode: What is the crime scene of the Cold
World? How is it to be decrypted? Where are its discontinuities. what is the
nature of its violence? Far from being a simple whodunnit. this case involves
a problematization of the detective figure itself qua set of cognitive methods
which in turn imply a model of the world and an image of thought-the suspicion
being that the time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a detective
story as it has been for so long....
Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato's analysis of the Cold War lifts the curtain
on the original 'scene of the crime'. delivering a forensic analysis of the forces
at work beneath this supposedly familiar historical episode. They demonstrate
clearly how. in deploying the political. economic. and technological spoils of the
arms race into the social and domestic sphere via a militarization of peace and
a cyberneticization of the social, the Cold War was instrumental in engineering
a Cold World to come. and that both are best seen as phases in an ongoing
mutation of the war machine constitutive of capitalism itself (the thesis of Wars
and Capital, from which the text is excerpted).5
With Truman's tenure marked by domestic labour strife as the demobiliza
tion of WWII caused profound dislocations. the US government instituted new
axiomatic formations with business to mutate and control workers and the
lower classes. and the entire country was initiated into a new type of 'people's
capitalism' based on a 'cold transdisciplinarity' generated by a 'reprogramming of
social life in its entirety' via 'psychosocial engineering'. In many ways this involved
a type of Washington Syndrome: Americans had been so traumatized by WWII
(although in a markedly different way than much of the rest of the world), and
then the strife of the postwar period, followed by the Korean War. that they
appeared ready to trade a massive nuclear build-up for stability-Eisenhower's
New Look. undergirded by the threat of massive thermonuclear retaliation-and
a new wave of consumption via an insidious form of endocolonization, in the
5.
Guerres et Capital (Paris: Editions Amsterdam. 2017): translation forthcoming (Serniotext(e). 2017).
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form of the primacy of capitalist-generated individual 'desire' ( initially codified by
Tru man's N SC 68 in the American/capitalist concept of the i ndividual-as-con
sumer being 'more vital than the ideology that fuelled Soviet dynamism') . As
Alliez and Lazzarato point out. 'a war of m issiles' is here 'doubled by a "gendered"
war of commodities'. The existential g lobal threat of annihilation and an inter nal
machinic slaving based upon a proliferating consumer 'dream-world ' would for m
the architecture of the globalizing project: America would become the pr inciple
avatar of a continually mutating capitalism based u pon the potential ontological
absolute of annihilation and the febrile seduction of a consumer cornucopia.
If. as Alliez and Lazzarato suggest. the Cold War ' mar k[ s] our entry into
the cyborg age of cybernetic commu nication and control ' a nd ' is itself a kind
of cyborg ' that couples the psychosocial dynamics of nuclear threat to the
economic benefits of the indebted nuclear family, then it is no sur prise that Cold
War images of the social machine at once reflected a submission to cyber netic
realism . and provided a backdrop for mythical fictions that tried to salvage
the possibility of relative transcendence f rom t he jaws of creeping nihilism. In
particular. the Cold War gave birth to a specific narrative a nd cinematic world
in which . above an irredeemably unjust world riven by paranoiac fear a heroic
figure is raised , one who lives beyond the obsolete strictures of conventional law
and social norms: a detective who grapples directly wit h the cont ingencies of
the real . yet whose success in resolving local situations only serves to reinforce
and reinscribe a global space of naturalised chaos. an all-against-all intractable
to the intelligence and refractory to any thinking in common .
It is this world of noir that Amanda Beech sees reiterated not only in more
recent Hollywood output . but also. int riguing ly, i n the conservatism of contem
porary art in its confrontations with t he neoliberal cont inuation of t he cybernetic
socius forged in t he heat of t he Cold War. For here. she arg ues. Art casts itself
in an equally heroic role, in claiming to offer an access to t he unknowable threat
of t he real that reason a nd politics cannot . Yet i n privileg i ng art as t he sole site
within which this real can be figured, and then only in a mode that repels cognitive
traction and collective construct ion. t h is heroism inscribes itself within a new
alienation as isolated and desocialised as t hat of t he noir gumshoe .
In her call for a renewed thinking of reason against t hese figures of alien
ating alienation whose individualised t ranscendence resigns us to an atomised
Hobbesian noir, Beech reflects the recent emergence of a functionalist and
pragmatically inflected attempt to develop an investigative 'critical ontology'
coupled with an epistemic dynamics. For her as for others, this task involves the
invention of a figure of ' reason' quite different from the reason whose strange
love for relentless calculative machinations the Cold War is condemned for having
accelerated uncontrolledly, to the point at which it revealed its inherent vice.
This non-dogmatic. asymptotic, 'colder' type of reason-one where affect and
emotion have been rethought and reconfigured . but by no means eliminated- is
cognizant of the brutal past in w hich reason had been a principal means of
expansion for the West's aggressive rationale. It announces itself as a thinking
now u nder the aegis of col lective. self-correcting. conceptually revisionary
processes which incorporate the malfeasance of the past as well as the current
moment. while remaining focused on a critical engagement with the future; a
resolutely non-totalising approach based on the idea that questions posed by
reason cannot be saturated by solutions. and one that implies a renewed and
innovative relation with the imagination. Finally, it demands an understanding of
how this ' new' reason. perhaps a neo-reason, functions within the continuum
running from the manifest to the scientific image.
This distinction , which we owe to W ilfrid Sellars's understanding of the
two basic ways in which humans view themselves and the world, is already
implicated in the Cold War home invasion described by Alliez and Lazzarato.
where the transfer of scientific-cybernetic management from the military to
the social , rendering politics a matter of 'getting numbers out', is complemented
by a regime of blandishments that serve to reinforce social subjection ( situation
room/situation comedy, a Sheltered Honeymoon... ) . The tensions of today's
Cold World have seen the inherited image of the human individual as subject
of social norms diverging yet more radically from the operational reality of a
social machine processing mediated 'dividuals'. And yet the computational
modelling of attention . decision, and identity continue to play a decisive role in
the retrenchment of the ideology of the ' i ndividual'. Although 'no one ever died
of contradictions', the concomitant backdraft of Cold World social and personal
pathologies poses a growing problem of containment , an increasingly acute
load on the system charged with maintaining their separation yet ensuring their
complementary function.
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As an alternative to this double-articulation we might consider Sellars's insist
ence on the necessity of intertwining the 'manifest image' and the 'scientific
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image'. Moreover. Sellars advises that we understand the manifest image not
as a fixed . 'pre-scientific, uncritical. na'ive conception', but as an operative
model that remains 'contemporary to the intellectual scene', and 'is not so much
ontological as normative( ... ] it indexes the community of rational agents'.6 The
status of this enduring image evidently has crucial political implications for the
thinking of the 'we.· of collective agencies-even more so given the suggestion
that it may be transformed through its intertwining with the scientific image, the
ensemble of current scientific models of the human. At the very least. Sellars's
demand here necessitates that artistic, philosophical. and political agents take
seriously both the scientific i mage in its most contemporary for m along with the
processes of inquiry that have yielded it and continue to refine it. and the 'space
of reasons' that constitutes the manifest image. together with its machining
via capitalist subjectivation. 7
How then to understand the intertwining of the manifest and the scientific
image, if both images possess constitutive autonomy, and if neither can be
subsumed under the other? Here Sellars's protean notion of picturing , and its
relation to the dynamics of the image, brings the concept of 'factual truth', or
'truth as correct picture' under the aegis of the image8-returning us to the
initial question posed to participants of the Cold War/Cold World project: What
models (of reason, truth, justice. and the real) do we adopt when we seek to
produce compelling images of the vertiginous cognitive disorientations of the
Cold World, many of them born of the mobilisation of the scientific image? And
what is their kinship with the models that underwrote the prevalent cultural
forms of the Cold War, in confrontation with an unknown yet absolute threat?
As Beec h demonstrates. in both cases, the modes of detection proposed by
investigators, and the questions they ask, tend to default to an outside of intelli
gence and an individual transcendence, staging a disintegration of the manifest
i mage and thereby closing off the option of any collective renegotiation of it.
6.
W. Sellars, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man', in Empiricism and the Philosophy of
Mind, 1-40: 6-7, and R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave.
2007), 5 (italics in the original).
7.
8.
Sellars, In the Space of Reasons, pp. 386-393.
J. F. Rosenberg, Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 57
(italics in the original), and chapter 5, 'Sellarsian Picturing'.
The question then becomes how genorate new Images of collective agency
I
that are not tr ansf'lxed Into Inaction by the sublime chaos of contingency, but
work with and within Its complexities. In what ways can Images and narratives
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construct agents who might decipher both the mutable continuum and cas
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cading contingencies that we determine In our descriptions of the Cold World?
How can the Cold World, with ell of Its apparent lnstabllltles, become a site for
a reconfigured comprehension of patterns and rules? Can our understanding
of this site of 'lawlessness' and alienation contribute to the enhancement of a
collective rationality?
Such a task may Involve the repurposlng of a number of tropes that
have been generally regarded as highly detrimental to any 'collective-based'
emancipatory project: f'lrstly, nihilism, rather than a 'pathological exacerbation
of subjectivism', becomes 'a speculative opportunity', a mode of 'active nihilism'
focused on the stratifications pervading Immanence end the ways In which
these structures can be mapped, altered, end augmen t ed .II The Idea of alienation
similarly undergoes en elemental re-engineering vie an enhanced attention to
norms end rules. one that challenges the dominance of neoliberal orthodoxy while
evading the dangerous contours of reactionary modernism through a resolute
engagement of reason with the Imagination In order to Instantiate a 'collective
activity 1 .. . )l as ] the deliberate construction of alienation that separates us from
what Is. toward the foreignness of what could be'.10
Robin Mackay's analysis of Invasion USA examines how the propagan
dist use of Images of excessive threat may serve es an Invitation to nlhlllsm .
ultimately exciting spectators not to moblllsetlon but to passivity. In the 1952
movie, hypnotized citizens ere bombarded with 'hot' Images of the effects of
a full-scale Invasion by the Soviet Union, complete with rampant use of the
atomic bomb on both sides. In order to reinvigorate their collectlve consciences.
Mackay's essay offers a comparison of this cinematic Cold War scenario with
contemporary 'machlnema: a type of Image-apocalypse. whose cooling down
by contemporary art via the gallery and the museum produces a comforting
form of elective hypnosis. The threat of extinction has been transferred from the
Q
10
Ar11rmlffr. Nlhtl llnbound, xi.
p Hood, 'Pnatscr lpt: Constructing Assemblies for Allenatlon', In M. Mlessen (ed.), Crossbenchlng
(IW.11111: : iturnbltrg/Merve. 2016).
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external to the internal via a 'cybernetics of control', but 'rather than unveiling
the real of the image' as a component in the Cold World's machinic network,
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art tends to 'present us with a hypnotic collage that offers the thrill of the real',
replaying the Cold War scenario by offering an edifying spectacle that ultimately
traps us in the closed circles traced out by Beech. He then offers a fundamental
question, one of several firmly encoded in this book, namely 'How does art make
images that image the yet-to_;be-known'? Reiterating the warning of Invasion
USA 's lugubrious prophet M r. Ohman, Mackay's suggestion is that the need to
'concentrate' on the trajectory of images in the technological dynamics of the
contemporary moment must mean something other than being mesmerised by
them, if we are to transform passive into active nihilism.
Christine Wertheim also looks to nihilism as a crucial place to assess the
artistic, but also political , potentialities in the contemporary moment. In an
important corrective to conceptions of the Cold World which rely too heavily on
an exaltation of radical contingency or intrinsic randomness, she follows Dominic
Fox in mining the resources of adolescent disquiet for strategies to exit the
'stuckness' that seems to pervade the social and political life of adults. For Fox
in Cold World, the essential difference in some ways would be between Eliot's
Wasteland and Beckett's Endgame, where in the latter 'the world is not losing its
mind but its contents'.11 For Wertheim , however, rather than contingency being
the defining problem, the essential malaise is nihilism, the dangerous temptation
of many adolescents in the face of the Cold World being to turn inward and to
wage war upon themselves, or to focus on the sym bolic economy, with mixed
results. Wertheim looks to both Ulrike Meinhof and to 'delinquent girls', eschewing
Fox's concentration on male artists ( his perusal of Meinhof in the last chapter
of his book, Wertheim argues, sees her actions as both mystery and failure).
Doubtful that the void of the world and the societal can be overcome by 'a
simple recognition of blind chance', she utilises Lacanian psychoanalysis, and
specifically a group who work exclusively with highly disturbed adolescents, to
argue that the struggle involves 'the very structure of the psyche itself': humans
are alienated by their very existence, language is flawed, andjouissance under
mines any ability to fully symbolize reality. Nihilism, for Wertheim , is structural,
and the ethical and political task she sets out suggests a trajectory far removed
11.
Fox, Cold World, 5-6.
from that of Fox 's protagonists of contingency (and that of Beech's noir hard
cases) . In this sense. alienation would be an inherent part of the U nconscious.
of jouissance. of charting the terrain of the unsymbolizable. Any notion of over coming it must therefore yield to the for mulation of tactics for dealing w ith its
ravages. but also for the actualization of new collectives. and differential local
and geopolitical structurations.
Given the evident importance of generating new fictions and figures in
order to weather the cold-to overcome the structural pain that is bor n by the
mismatch between the demands of the manifest image and a Cold Wor ld that
refuses to satisfy them- Br ian Evenson's subtle analysis of the relation between
fiction and personal exper ience grants a sur pr isingly positive role to an affect
often seen as betokening mere escapism. Recalling Mackay's uneasy memoir
of Cold War terror as a for mative exper ience, Evenson's analysis understands
nostalgia as a transference of pain. and reflects upon its possible metamorphosis
through art .
Evenson begins with a n almost longue dun�e approach here. assaying the
trajectory of writing from the beginnings of moder nity: the basic problematic
that emerges involves the opposition between the mimetic and a type of shaping.
or constructivism . Even the mirroring of reality by wr iters will be subject to the
shifting sense of what the mirror does. as it becomes less a 'clear ' reflection
than an instr ument subject to distortion and corruption . deforming the image
according to the skill and style of the artist . In an intr iguing manoeuvre he then
mor phs the concept of nostalgia into a possible site of non-fixity, of a dynamics
of excess. and of a possible non-linear temporality where the lost object will be
'replaced ' by the attempt to capture ' lost' intensities. Nostalgia will be transformed
into/as pain, and materialised as art-and nostalgia in this transformed mode
will be 'communal not individual'. Consider ing the bi-polar peoples of Beszel and
UI Qoma in China M ieville's The City & The City, subject to the most extreme
form of reciprocal unknowing , Evenson highlights the over lap or crosshatching
of their apparently binary domains: ' under neath' this for mation exists a possible
third city, a speculative and intense city as occasion for art. and as an occluded
site of both the Cold War and the Cold World.
Br inging us back to the figure of the detective. Reza Negarestani's contr ibu
tion offers us a portrait of t he breakdown of the very method of detection itself.
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and a portrait of a new agent who will challenge the most fundamental figures of
'reason'. Using the case of Matthai, the detective in Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1958
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novel The Pledge. Reza Negarestani challenges both deductive and inductive
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modes of analysis, indicting traditional detective fiction, but also contemporary
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techniques characteristic of neoliberal capitalism's appropriation of scientific
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modes of hard realist fiction, those generated by the forensic and procedural
method. Working through a Humean critique of induction. and further refining
his approach first with Nelson Goodman. and then Hilary Putnam's reworking via
Gooel's incompleteness theorem, Negarestani pushes the corrosive of epistemic
scepticism to the point at which cognitive science becomes 'a pseudo-science',
computational functionalism is bankrupt. and one can no longer 'trust' the blind
god of evolution. Negarestani's solution will be as provocative as his diagnosis:
armoury of reason at the ready, the detective must also regularly top up his hip
flask with the 'superacid' of epistemological scepticism....
Negarestani's analysis of the inadequacy of Matthai's method immediately
brings to mind another unorthodox and strategic Cold War detective, Roberta
Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter used a key conclusion from her earlier attempted
dissertation on Hamlet-that the Danish Prince's perceived solipsism could be
interpreted 'as a reflection of crisis in Western societies during periods of intense
pessimism'-as a marker for a path-breaking work. a careful scrutiny of the
attack on Pearl Harbor in December. 1941, and by extension its implications for
thermonuclear warfare.12 In doing so, she testified, like DOrrenmatt. to the Cold
War's forcing of the compelling and potentially existential questions addressed by
Negarestani: how to think a future different from the past, and how to address
the overarching human incapacity to anticipate the unfamiliar.13 Her conclusions.
which converged with both those of her husband Albert Wohlstetter and those
of the pre-eminent military think tank RAND in Santa Monica, CA. where both
worked at the time. asserted the necessity for the dominance of 'imaginative
possibilities, rather than reasonable probabilities'-in other words. build into the
military system such incredible redundancies that the Soviet Union would be
convinced the United States had the military might and strategic will to engage
12.
R. Wohlstetter. Pearl Harbor: �ming and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1962).
13.
Robin. The Cold War They Made, 59-60. (Existential questions are often the favoured terrain
See R. Robin. The Cold \4b'k1 They Made (Camtlidge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 34-5.
of the more unorthodox detective.)
in a thermonuclear war that 'fell short of global extinction'. From Wohlstetter's
11
investigations of the 'failures' of US military intelligence which led to the attack
on Pearl Harbor. she argued that another surprise attack could happen and
almost certainly would, that imaginative strategies must be put into place
to counter this. and that the only means by which the 'goals' of deterrence
could be accomplished would be an unprecedented defence profile capable of
withstanding any first strike by an adversary, and delivering a devastating and
decisively massive retaliatory blow to that enemy (conclusions her husband
would then use as a linchpin for his 'strategic balance of terror'). Here the Cold
War begets one type of Cold World, as the operational axis explicitly stated here
would involve embracing uncertainty via a post-Clausewitzian thermonuclear
defence so overwhelming that it becomes offense.14 This thinking is one of the
more chilling ways in which thinkers come to grips with perhaps the central
issue creating a through line between the Cold War and the Cold World. one
which continues to create geotrauma of varying configurations and intensities
as, in Mackay's words. the 'absoluteness of the threat relativises everything',
and humankind and the planet continue to seek multiple vectors to traverse
this 'ontological alienation'.
As the escalation of the Cold War exploded the logical space of reasons.
then, it also discovered the force of fictioning (something like the deliberate
construction of 'unknown unknowns' avant la lettre; as Beech remarks. 'abstract
fictions are woven into the fabric of the space of reason'), overstepping the
'hard realism' of technoscience and naturalisation (the subsumption of everything
to hard facts. 'to get numbers out'). The resulting vision of futurity therefore
implies not only potential empirical destruction but also. and more profoundly,
epistemic disturbance. As suggested by the texts collected here. this double
impact can lead the investigator to recoil, if not into immobilised fear, then into
more or less explicit abdications of systematic understanding and narrowed
vistas of expectation. Optimistically and ambitiously, Negarestani instead relays
DOrrenmatt's urgent call to update the customary model of knowledge production
14.
Ibid., 11, 20-21, 62-63. There has been great controversy about her work on multiple levels:
Suffice to say, both her analyses and those of her husband were to have a dramatic impact. This work
also has powerful connections with that of Herman Kahn, a colleague of the Wohlstetters at RAND
and one of the inspirations for Kubrick's Or. Strange/ova; his most important book was crucial to the
era: On Thermonuclear War.
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as reflected in the dassic persona of the detective. Epistemological scepticism
becomes a resource for the possjbdity of rethinking both manifest and scient1flc
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images. and the aspect of Cold Wortd realism is transformed. its figure now
"
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a 'true detective' disenchanted of all certainties yet commi tted to ongoing
epcstemc inquiry.
Two responses from Joshua Johnson and Patricia Reed relay this call. and
consolidate the question-problem com�x tackled by the other contri bu tions.
Taking up the philosophical challenge to scientism that Negarestani sees
dramatised in OOrrenmatt's ftctiOn. Johnson returns to Sellars's proposal for
recon figuring the connectoo between ought and iS-between t he space of
norms t hat cons titute the manifest image. and the space of naked contingent
causality that as the locus of Cold War and Cold World fear. He highlights
some recent developments in cognitive scienee (descended from the very
'cold interdisciplinarrty" that Alliez and Lazzarato condemn
-
th e irony perhaps
SVf1'1)tomatic of a faultline at once phi losoph ical and generatiOnal) which may
provide exemplary tools for the 'stereoscopic' fusing of the two images. at
once suggesting ways to understand the human decision-making process. and
potentials for extending the possibility of artiStic actiOn into tactical aest hetic
intervention. as an indispensable component of a collective political strategy.
In her c:onduding text . Patricia Reed provides a concise symptomatology
of the reactive formatiOns occasioned by the 'humiliations' of Cold World
existence. In response, her outline of a collective action to counteract their
passivity demands that we grasp the 'decentring' of t he human as an opportu
nrty, through a considered mobilisat ion of the hypothetical and the otherworldly
in new collectively -constructed fictions: the 'affective '"heat"' generated by
estrangement rrust be chamelled into a deliberate and optimistic programme of
alienation Here as in Joh nson's text the decoupling of dizz ying complexity from
.
impotence . of the unrepresentable from the unknowable. of depersona lisation
from dehumanisation. becomes the task of the imaginative resources of art in
the broadest sense. fuelled by the 'abductive power of the hypothetical'.
As Johnson's examples suggest. this will involve an occu pation of the
technological sites from wh ich dimensions of the Cold World can be rendered
tractable to new modes of enhanced conceptual labour-in effect. modes of
imaging able to detiver nonhuman indices of the real as resources for wresting
back agency in Wohlstetter's 'imaginative possibilities, rather than reasonable
probabilities'. Where images, figures of knowledge, or 'maps' are liable to be
understood as totalising and definitive, or as mere local charts with no capacity
for broader orientation, Reed invites us instead to understand them as existing
in a dynamic relationship with the complex territory they aim to map- imaging
as an engine not a camera; modelling as a participant in worldbuilding.
The texts collected here range across the breadth and depth of a research
project in progress. grappling with the question of the agency of the image as
it operates both within and against knowledge and cognition. If the images and
figures we use to portray the contemporary condition imply epistemological dra
mas in which we are implicated as actors and investigators. then understanding
the epistemic models implied and (re)produced by their form and content goes
hand in hand with the project of producing new figures of inquiry, cognition.
and potential transformation. In the face of a Cold World subjectivation which ,
as Alliez and Lazzarato clarify, is largely the ramified product of the Cold War
machine. such figures may, as Reed suggests, require us to forge new concep
tions of the subject. As Negarestani insists, they will imply a new negotiation of
our cognitive relation to future events: and, contrary to those figures of the noir
tradition analysed by Beech , they should not cede the normative space of the
social quite so readily. They may even be conditioned by nihilism or by nostalgia.
but should not yield to the hypnotic glamour of the unbearably fragmented. the
absolutely contingent. or the stupefyingly totalised .
Expressed in varying ways throughout the texts collected here is a call no
longer to be transfixed by the alluring abstraction of such melodramatic cliches,
but to commence unfixing. fictioning, and intertwining the multiple images of the
human and its planetary, political. and existential situation in practices fuelled by
the imaginative possibilities opened up by extended cognition and a remodelled
reason. Although far from guaranteeing us Saved! , such a project may serve to
counteract a passive resignation to our Doomed! predicament by intelligently
grasping the complexity, extremity, and unpredictability all too often envisioned, in
a projection of the darkness of human unknowing, as a numinous. overpowering
cloud overshadowing intelligence and threatening collective survival.
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