I.

It’s a convention of this (dying) genre: a “blog” as such must reveal a tendency for (and a tendency to indulge in) eye-wandering and light grazing, the logical endpoint of which is the antiepideictic fixed point of “procrastination”. This fixed endpoint strives to achieve a critique of inaction by bracketing out all doubts (all thought, really) of what, exactly, is worth doing. What’s left to explain is, then, psychological: procrastination is (sometimes succesfully) understood to be an anxiety response. Alas, this is a snake biting its own tail: this anxiety is all about the bracketing-out itself and the resulting exorbitance of the main task ahead. Now: procrastination is a popular theme because it’s amenable to chicken-soup cures that revolve around this exorbitance; thereafter there’s nothing to the main task but to do it.

Of course these cures are ultimately underwhelming; they implicitly refer to acute spells (whereas procrastination is a chronic tendency).

Yet: it should be clear, however indirectly, that an account of how procrastination works needs first to account for how procrastination as a concept comes to coalesce and then become an active concern. It’s not enough to bracket out the general issue of whether we want to wrestle with the soi-disant main task: procrastinating behavior is a clear and transparent sign of not wanting to deal with the main task. How does then procrastination (or “akrasia”, yadda gadda da-vida) manifest as a concern of note? Everything here tells us that we’re dealing with ambivalence — we’re “of two minds”. Is ambivalence by Aristotelian necessity anxiety-inducing? Is the anxiety a technical device we use to map higher-order time-preference valuation onto this flat field of two-mindedness? If the latter — is the exorbitance a miniature model of what it feels like to continually produce a mind — a representative thread, temporally consistent and accountable.

Yet — doesn’t talk of procrastination evince an unwilligness or inability of groups to align on ambivalence as such? The “procrastinator” finds himself in something of a short-term pickle, much like someone who needs cross a traffic-heavy street; he’s already announced one-mindedness without having really achieved it. In this way, two-mindedness is “laundered away”, never really having been mined for the many one-minds it implies.

It’s in this way that quability theory (so often deprecated and then revived) is a theory of “human resources” and “organizational behavior” and all such sweetness; or even a theory of the manager as philon logous kai spoudazon peri paideia; or even an account of “getting things done” from the quability conditions of culture-formation-slash-culture-sculpture. The abstract understanding of this implies as a corollary an abstract understanding of how two-mindedness resolves (and when it should).

The painful flip side: as forcefully denounced in recent times, General Axiology is a bogus notion — but not as much because “genericity” is incoherent as an idea, but because only paideia is real and genericity militates against it. Yes, this is still an upwards spiral; all movement is in some sense recursive and hierarchical through layers and levels and plateaus of “quability conditions on the quability conditions on the…” but this has a final floor on “… the quability conditions on the quability conditions OF paideia”.

II.

Ongoing conditions force us to step way beyond radical theories of mindmaking — post- or noncognitivism (and so on). A new kind of dementia — a roaring, forceful, in its own way glorious kind — haunts the ruins of what I, 15 or 20 years ago, used to call the “Socratic project”. There is some of this dementia in the very act of calling it so, by something like an emotional appeal to a yardstick called “sound mind”; there are, in fact, no such markers of note, and even coming up with a neologism like “amentia” fails to shake loose cogito and reason. It should be, of course, remarked that the Socratic project is more or less robust to a collapse in contemporary notions of mind and cognition. It’s less clear, however, that there is a continuable Socratic project rather than a Socratic crisis in the bosom of Greek paideia — military leaders (for example) disconnected enough from agonistic arete that they can be led into aporia by someone who fought as a foot soldier and now claims to hear voices. This echoes in turn the near-loss of writing in a previous epoch of collapse, and more generically the continual stumbling of Man into darkness.

This gives us a kind of political-compass chart: Socrates as crisis-event or civlizational project, on the horizontal, and cogito versus amentia on the vertical. Cogito plus crisis gives us Aristotle, intellectual life as a generalized, if deracinated, form of paideia, and, after a while, capitalism. Cogito plus projct gives theory the role of ballast or tuned mass; amentia plus crisis implies the role of intellectuals is to keep the candle burning; amentia plus project implores, in vain, for social engineering. Possible archetypes, respectively: David Ricardo and Warren Buffet; Ibn Arabi and Erasmus; Werner Jaeger and Schoenberg; Wynton Marsalis and Lyndon LaRouche. Somewhere in the center (but this is guessworkish and inherently contentious and more than a little forced): Deleuze’s Hume, Deleuze’s Spinoza and, well, Deleuze.

[Not that there’s intrinsic merit to centrism, of course; a centrist politics must justify itself either by the fundamental stupidity (at one point I wanted to say “dysmentia”…) of extremes or by a radical difference that elevates it from the flat map of the compass to a higher dimensional vanishing point.]

If amentia sounds overly abstract, consider what has been popularized in engineering as “the bitter lesson”: large, stupid computer models are extraordinarily more effective than artisanal, reasoned-through ones. Since, increasingly, “computer model” can stand for any product of human technical ingenuity, the bitter lesson is a floating-bridge whammy bar: “amented” or “nonminded” representations of technical problems are, essentially, the only viable ones — but worse, nonminded approximations to mindful problems are taken to be sufficient. More crudely put: the plus-à-jouir of “mind” as applied to mindable problems and tasks is founded and guaranteed by a mindable theory of the world. Where we once asked whether we could know what it’s like to be a bat, we now ask whether language models are able to “reason”. Isn’t it striking how little pushback AI companies get for the incredible misuse of that most hallowed signifier of modernity — reason?

III.

The hard claim asemic horizon is willing to make is that Artificial Intelligence (from Cybersyn to Stable Diffusion and beyond) is unable to germinate. This isn’t (just) a mystical claim about all that’s pluripotential and therefore fraying, frayeux at the edges of causality — it touches on core “technosocial” (what an ugly word to overspecify that which ultimately has no boundaries in the interfacticity) capabilities such as the power to redesirate — to bring the atelic back from the dead. Not just a claim, therefore, about God’s wounds, but on our ability to glorify and reanimate (and, really, reinflate) Him.

If that flight of metaphysics scares xor offputs, consider the following “soft claim”: Artificial Intelligence in its current iteration is the claimed realization of a shameful dream. It is a base dream, like somehow getting simultaneous sexual gratification from two totally hot babes; it’s a low dream that leads us astray from will-to-power and consumes us with logistics; it’s a shameful dream because no one is really able to affirm it with a head held high. This is why AI is sold to us in terms of practicality and productivity — I could write a twice-weekly asemic horizon newsletter if only I would get chatbots to interpolate my random mental connections between the doctrine of wahdat-al-wujud and the tonal slides of dialecto lunfardo (perhaps by means of Sabrina Carpenter’s legs, or something).

But productivity is a ruse, a lure, a cardboard cutout, a distraction; AI salesmanship is tied to this lure because the net claimed effect of its product is to displace our own generativity. Productivity is then scandalously equated with yielding into dementia. This isn’t necessarily bad (not in the way of VR headsets that displace the agon of seduction for push-button illusions of sexual prowess, anyway): maybe this dementia that desires dementia is General Axiology, the ultimate bliss from which we were derailed by emergencies of survival that sent us down the slippery slope into agriculture-to-writing-to-ultratechnology. But what is really in the quability conditions for this disaster? Do such conditions rule out philology-and-zealotry-for-paideia?