Into the Wastes

“‘The wasteland grows.’ It means, the devastation is growing wider. Devastation is more than destruction. Devastation is more unearthly than destruction. Destruction only sweeps aside all that has grown up or been built up so far; but devastation blocks all future growth and prevents all building. Devastation is more unearthly than mere destruction. Mere destruction sweeps aside all things including even nothingness, while devastation on the contrary establishes and spreads everything that blocks and prevents. The African Sahara is only one kind of waste land. The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men. Devastation can be the same as both, and can haunt us everywhere in the most unearthly way by keeping itself hidden. Devastation does not just mean a slow sinking into the sands. Devastation is the high-velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne.”[1]

Destruction, or destruktion in Heideggerian terms, sweeps aside all things. Devastation is the establishment of blockages, barriers to thought. As per Nietzsche, the wastelands are the space of the last man, the endpoint of thinking as that which can be thought. Anything beyond the wastes is the unthought, the unthinkable which transgresses being. Being in this sense is a normative presence, without significant discomfort, instead aiming toward a generalisable contentedness.

Endpoint is a misnomer, as there is no actual end in such comfortable thought. Endings as in collapses, catastrophes or ruptures are not conceptualisable except as dystopic fantasy, relegating them to an anti-praxis that cannot reflect reality. “Nietzsche characterizes the last man as prevailing man in the process, so to speak, of fortifying in himself human nature as it is so far.”[2] This fortification reifies a progressive teleology of continual betterment irrespective of growing currents of discontent and transformative regression.

Existing political ontologies can only maintain themselves within this paradigm, positing the existence of collective action as a must that will come about. Climate change is the most obvious example. “The discussion or discourse of the Anthropocene often promotes a new universal subject: not the class-conscious international proletariat, but a species-conscious planetary humanity. This is a nice idea amid a runaway ecological crisis with no deliberate agent behind it.”[3] A universal subject is a requirement not of material reality or facticity but of mythopolitical exigencies that tries to hold alterity within its ontological purview. Without a subject, they must come face-to-face with absolute inertia, the realisation that there is no future of the political. There is just an aporia that blocks all thought other than the unthought.

“It lies precisely in the sphere of scientific exploration. Historical science may thoroughly explore a period, for instance, in every possible respect, and yet never explore what history is. It cannot do so, scientifically.”[4] It cannot explore its essence without the scaffolding of theory that it relies upon to conceptualise its thinking. Going back to climate change, the scientific answers of upward limits are themselves no answer. Statistical models can be constructed that legitimate increasing world temperatures, exteriorising them into forms of adaptation that are themselves unexplained, pushed into a futurity of musts and wills. We can only conceive modernity as a forever-presence, never looking into its essence because to do so would be to deconstruct modernity as a mythology, a set of interlocking assumptions that require constant informational feedback to continue working. We may understand history as a series of events but we do not know what that history means, what the essence of its being was. Equally, we can conceive collapse as a potential state of existing systems but cannot relate collapse to futurity. Collapse is only a byproduct, never a totalisation. To accept the latter would be to fall into the unthinkable where preconceived notions and theoretical scaffolding are redundant.

Unifying this stasis of thought is the bare desire for human survival, not in the sense of apocalyptic visions or the immanentization of the eschaton as transformative conditions but of a lasting presence of modernity as our evolved condition. This is the nature of forever-presence, a historical stasis that has scientised being into evolutionary and economic currents. To be is to contain Dasein into systems that overlay being-in-the-world. Capital, technology and scientific enquiry intermediate being, closing off the void and instead presenting a shared social reality whose telos is law. “In contemporary terms, this progress has assumed the character of an accelerating trend toward collapse, compounded by the exploitation of labor by capital on a global scale and the imminent threat of climate crisis on a planetary scale.”[5]

“What we call ‘social reality’ is more accurately thought of as social fantasy. In this fantasy, the social world is complete, contained and secure. It appears as though we have the answer to most of the questions we need to ask, or at least we are happy (or pretend to be happy) to assume that we do. We choose to forget those that we have no answers to the awkward questions about life, death, survival.”[6] They are subsumed as effects of life, unquestioned facts that are enclosed by the working of the systems themselves. Mythologisation around the real of death. To confront death and survival is to reach the end, breaking the mythos of forever-presence.

Categories of humanity and the world are the ground for forever-presence, presenting an enframed set of relations and possibilities that are cartographically inscribed. “An institutional cartography then meant the literal expansion of power through legibility.”[7] The growth of the technical society is an object-materiality via technicity. Technological colonisation of relations of equipmentality and worldness. Ready-to-handness is overturned in the pure objectivity of presence as a technological temporality of forever-presence determines the conditions for an overturning of being. Everything is to be made legible via the intermediation of technologies (of mapping, of information storage, of interfaces) that increase the complexity of relations and reduce both the power of the will and the means to face being. Devastation is the expansion of technological wills that displace being-in-the-world into a containerised (in the logistical sense) set of pregivens.

Logisticality is the mechanism of the technical society. “They separate control from productive capacity/innovation, or in a more Nietzschean sense they separate will from power.”[8] Possibility is preset within arrays of information, predictive algorithms determining the set of options allowable given material conditions and the limits of the existing telos. Survival is pregiven. Globality is pregiven. Thought as the function of the productive, of the Cartesian proclivity to associate thought with the subject, is pregiven. We are pregiven subjects striated by systems of legibility. “The thoughtfulness of calculative rationality threatens to obliterate the possibility for being-thoughtful.”[9]

Is this apex of modernity the endpoint, the true end of history? Can we conceive of being beyond this trajectory? Heidegger talks of historical overturning as the potential for new forms of historicality, for new subjectivities as per Foucault. “This happens by way of a letting-be and a letting-go, by way of a certain detachment which is essentially an attunement to the silent voice of being.” But “the possibility of another beginning and another epoch of being is just that: a possibility. The decision concerning such a mutation in the historical unfolding of being is not ours.”[10] For it not to be ours, for it not to be within collective power means the end of politics, the potentiality of being going beyond the will to power. This is in the acceptance of collapse as the breaking of forever-presence, opening historicality to questioning. To run alongside nihilism as both a confrontation and an egress.

Who is the actor to affirm this overturning? The will of a sovereign or a collective exegesis of thinking through art? More than politics, are we talking of a linguistic overturning, a new semantics of being to conflict with the semantics of logisticality? The very position of an actor makes an anthropological assumption that in some sense still traps us in the historical stasis of bare survival. Such an innately archic assumption sets different limits that foreshadow a continuation of the comfort of the wastelands.

“Being nevertheless withdraws from being fully understood and remains mysterious. When thinking-thanking attempts to seek grounds to explain the excitement of the dance of Being, the ‘it gives’ withdraws and wonder gives over to mere curiosity.”[11] By assuming an affirmatory actor, we fall into the withdrawal, back into the ontic rationality of everyday being and its pregivens. But still the question must be asked, what is the space or place of this overturning? Where can the contemplation that explores against withdrawal occur?

“Re-examining Dasein’s role in the midst of this accelerating trend toward more advanced transmutation of the world, or the intensive objectification of the world into technical values, would demand, apropos the fundamental articulation of human culture threatened by the techno-determinism of the present, that a restoration of the fundamental nexus between speech and work, language and labor should be taken up beyond the simple academism of retrofitting concepts according to the spirit of the time. In essence this restoration would amount to a return to a tradition of philosophizing that is more akin to a type of doing philosophy before its appropriation in ancient modernity beginning with Aristotle.”[12]

Is this tradition encapsulated in the university as explicated in Heidegger’s rectoral address? Contemporarily, the university is another site of technicity, another flow in logistical circuits of information exchange and the production of (human) capital. Are there any conceivable institutions or loci that can encapsulate this return to philosophising, to an in-dwelling thought that moves beyond forever-presence? Again, is this question too anthropological, too political? Must we forget such concepts and their associated humanisation? The move from logisticality to linguisticality, to the examination of language and its production, demands new forms of thinking, new subjectivities that are not enclosable. They must be illegible to technicity and its semantics. “As post-cogitational it must be presumed that Dasein is already divested of the ‘metaphysic’ of animal rationale that has recently evolved into a highly abstract computational entity. It is in this sense that the power of appropriation of things or objects no longer rests in Man (cogitative) but in Dasein, at the same time that the mode of ‘appropriation shifts from signifying to asignifying, cogitational to post-cogitational, a changed condition of existence sufficient for, yet still untried, poetic kind of appropriation.”[13] To rest in Dasein is to begin new forms of appropriation, new forms of will divorced from the prevailing methods of power. Being-in-the-world ruptures into being-toward-collapse as our thinking is fragmented into patchwork constructs. This is a facing toward the wasteland, looking into the void as the mysterious unknowable, something conflictual as much as meditative.

“It is to think the limit of thinking, to dwell in that liminal space where thought encounters its own failure and persists anyway. It is to remain with the question even when the question dissolves. It is to unlearn not only the categories that define us but the need for categories at all.”[14] In the post-cogitational we are moving away from scientific concepts of being, aiming toward their essence rather than ensconced in their frameworks, accepting their collapse as recreative in our patchworks of thought. “We are a sign not yet read”[15]. The wastes are only an end, an aporia of modernity. The technical society points toward technological being, its own historical turn one of pure totalisation. One where death is escaped in the permanence of data. Everything would be readable, legibility the criteria for existence. This is the end of the technical society and the beginning of its successor of endless logistics. Man reduced to meatspace.

To be not read is to go further into those wastelands, turning devastation into destruction. “On our way toward thinking, we hear a word of poesy. But the question to what end and with what right, upon what ground and within what limits, our attempt to think allows itself to get involved in a dialogue with poesy, let alone with the poetry of this poet – this question, which is inescapable, we can discuss only after we ourselves have taken the path of thinking.”[16] Thinking in the poetical means into creation itself. The creation of verse and its meaning in relation to being. But we must go along the path of thinking, into an appropriative Dasein of the unthought. The poetic and artistic registers represent an ontophania, a sensing of being through our confrontation with words and images that force us to stare into ourselves, into the void itself to see what lurks in its depths.

Beyond the duality of conscious and unconscious, beyond the symbolic and the real, the unthought of the wastelands becomes an ontophanic mania of struggle. A “post-vital drift, a condition of existence without teleology”[17] that moves beyond the conditions of survival into confrontations with life and death as plastic phenomena, to be treated as their own spaces of creativity rather than beginning or end. To think is to confront, to struggle with existence and to look toward nonexistence not as nihilistic being but as an undoing, new forms of becoming in our ways of memorialisation and relationality. This is to question the very heart of humanity, to question what care is, to conceive new souls beyond theological restrictions. New beginnings of myth-making and linguistic construction, breaking the scientistic grip of evental history and temporality.

The wastelands are the passing over of the last man, the site of historical configurations and deformations. The last site of the last man, the plane of his trajectory falling into the detritus of technical society. As Heidegger notes, the wastes are not necessarily a place of discomfort, but a historical stasis where the ability to think being beyond the present ceases. “Ideas then limit themselves to whatever happens to be provided at the moment”[18]. Yet the wastes are a juncture of being, waiting for the overturning. Wasteland then contains a double meaning, being the site of the passing over of man and the potential ground for new being(s) to emerge. Means of thought beyond the present understanding, birthing monsters that do not luxuriate in collapsing comfort. This must be understood in the present context of the taking over of the technical society.

Technology is a paradigmatic shift of reasoning and being. We are intermediated by the interface, the control panel. Fields of potentiality become grids of possible states. Rather than the emergence of an Übermensch there is an ontological limitation of forever-presence, of an historical-cultural pastiche of eternal recurrence that places modernity as the telos of being-in-the-world. Overtaking logos and pathos, telos is an unreachable endpoint, a limit to all limits. Something forever being reached but never grasped, maintaining historical stasis as the position of the last man. Factically, we can see the horizon of modernity in industrial heat-death, the growing emergence of new sovereign wills and the repetition of a dying lebenswelt. But the teleological myth remains. Our lifeworld is intact, only reform is needed. Something will be done. The desperation of the last statement now defines world action. We must decide continuity now or forever be cast into barbarism, we must give up our thoughts to the new technological god who can regulate our lives. But what is the double nature of the wastes? Maybe, we should go deeper into the wastes, making illegible our constructions of being. To birth new subjectivities.

In their double nature, wastelands can be postmodern frontiers, escapes from the logistical arrays of calculative rationality. Here can begin the exploration of thinking within ontological collapse, what it means to think the unthought, to explore the aporias of existence and question the necessitation of life’s categorisation. A post-vital drift is one that dislodges forever-presence, centring death and non-existence as components of our being. No longer scrabbling for survival, political ontologies focused on the fear of barbarism (those barbarians at the gate) become meaningless, intrigues into collective fear of death and the end.

Exploration of the wastelands is ruptural, a desert ontology, “a mode of unbeing, in which all inherited ontological structures are rendered inoperative. It is the radical sufficiency of what has no reference, no anchoring semiotics, no claim to meaningfulness according to the metrics of worlded metaphysics.”[19] Going back to my questions on the need for space or site of being, we see their metaphysical claws trying to hook back in. Sufficiency and destabilisation unsettle spatial logics. Rather, place in Casey’s sense[20] emerges, a constructible set of meanings that imbue space with being. Rather than the former grounding the latter, we see a dance between them that is almost nomadic, ephemeral in the way that historicality requires destruction and reconstruction for the renewal of meaning. “Not only is the world not promised to humanity; it is not even guaranteed to be hospitable to organic life. There are no promises.” “Contrary to a world of tight and perpetual equilibria, life is, in the final instance, novel and not reducible to initial conditions.”[21] There are no true traditions, no timelessness. Only the (re)creation of memories and myths through an ontophanic patchwork of fragments, always struggling with entropy.

Such rupture also occurs on the temporal plane. The wastes of time ignore the event or its taxonomisation onto a historical trajectory. To go deep in the wasteland is to forgo telos, to forgo endpoints as if there where something to reach toward. “The answer is not to collapse into a fetishised presentism — which is merely the commodified temporality of neoliberal capital — but to affirm an untimely temporality. Not kairos as divine intervention, nor chronos as metric duration, but what we might call an-archic time: time without origin, without destination, without sequence. Time as exposure, as dispersal, as drift. In this an-archic time, the question is not how to shape the future, but how to unbind being from the demand to shape anything at all.”[22]

The concept of trauma time, “as a ‘thread thrown’ between the dead and those who survive”[23], is one such type of opening, an aporia within settled onticity. Here relationality is reconstituted in a new time of presencing. The dead remain present, neither at an end nor memorialised. Trauma time is a drift between life and death, questioning the modality of existence in the non-acceptance of loss. This always-holding-onto rejects linearity, removing the traumatic event from a sequential set and instead making it purely evental, beyond the organising of history and into something an-archic. Being-towards-death is unsettled as we question who is really dead, whether those who survived are living or forever within the evental past. Collapse would inhere such trauma, the traumatic nature of collapse as the end of life (in the sense of forever-presence) and an opening onto new modes of existence. The opening of new places, places of trauma, patchworks of existence that drift within the timelines of catastrophism.

Where actors or places may come about as sovereign or artistic wills, they exist as detritus, the waste products of modernity. “War and the drive to homogenization endemic to the Eurocene cannot be disowned or expelled. They must be diverted by other incipient becomings.”[24] These are the beginnings of the wastelands, those existing spaces of liminality between existence and non-existence. The camps, conflict zones, flyover country, slums, ghettoes. Forgotten or ignored in existing political ontologies as the inhabitants are neither subjects nor objects. They cannot participate nor can they be used. Beyond citizen or denizen, merely abstracted as fodder.

“Freaks live in this interregnum between disgust and indifference. They are forms of life that bear some connection with the others capable of being encountered but simultaneously possess an incongruity that offends our physiognomical literacy. Freaks live among us as horizons or closures to a world of possibility between the normative somatic human and the monster.”[25] Freaks are within the wastes, social detritus that has no use economically, politically or culturally. Ontologically speaking, they have no being as they are not questioned. There existence is a logistical error.

Goffman notes them as deviations, unable or unwilling to accept the social places offered to them. Extra-institutionally existing. “These are the ‘disaffiliates.’ Those who take this stand on their own and by themselves might be called eccentrics or ‘characters.’ Those whose activity is collective and focused within some building or place (and often upon a special activity) may be called cultists. Those who come together into a sub-community or milieu may be called social deviants, and their corporate life a deviant community. They constitute a special type, but only one type, of deviator.”[26] These deviators can affect the contours of social reality, particularly in the forms of masking adopted by such deviators who exist between affiliation and disaffiliation (the double nature returning again). By presenting oneself precariously, on the edges of identity that flows between virtuality and actuality, one can unsettle the nature of that reality by imputing parts of their actual self into the corpus of social facts. “For in imputing identities to individuals, discreditable or not, the wider social setting and its inhabitants have in a way compromised themselves.”[27] Freaks or deviants can liminally disrupt the social consensus, the they-self[28].

Zarathustra’s cave presents such a liminal form of existence, a pocket within place that becomes a juncture for transvaluation. Pushing onto the limitations of forever-presence, ontophania can emerge from the beginnings of the wastes, within those pockets of societal detritus that question the bounds of reality itself. Something similar could be witnessed within the millenarian movements of the Middle Ages. A variety of peasant revolts and religious manias sprang up in the aftermath of the Black Death and the beginnings of European capitalism. Ranters, Anabaptists and flagellants presented an immanentizing collapse via God’s judgment, anarchically organising bands of peasants and reavers to become new barbarians at the gates of feudal institutions and their subjugation of an emerging urban proletariat. Cohn’s[29] dismissive treatment of these movements as little more than excesses or violent mobs understates the (temporary) power they wielded and the religious manias they inspired. Across Western Europe, there was a period of material conditions and spiritual exegesis that conquered cities and required sovereign absolutism to maintain order. These premodern deviants point toward the potential of ontophanic exegesis, of thought as a weapon of struggle in the (de)constructions of patchworks and the unsettling of the spatiotemporal consensus.

Exploring premodern ontologies further, another relation to waste can be noted in Neolithic Britain’s monument construction and uses of space. Archaeological investigation of midden piles and deposits[30] present ontological indications of the nature of being alongside their monumentality. Through waste and monument emerges pre-political understandings of conflict and belief, mediated by the equipmentality of their ceremonial and hunting devices. A perspectival lens can unearth prehistorical ontology as one deeply connected to objectness, where objects are imbued with meanings beyond use or exchange value. A de-anthropomorphisation of arche-ontology as objects themselves move beyond a subjective disposition, containing within them collective ontophania that unsettles individualised or humanistic accounts. Here, the sovereign will of monumentality or the organisational loci of ceremonial production ontologically prefigure being-in-the-world.

“Such moments of possibility are obscured by the towering authority of normative theories of order and progress. Experiments, practices, new media, drugs, social arrangements, habits, irrationalities, bizarre affinities, creativities that attend to these fleeting punctuations in historical movement sometimes allow us to become otherwise than what is expected, planned, prudent, pragmatic, realistic, or ordained.”[31] Into the wastes we go, as exploratory horizons beyond the stasis of devastation. To unsettle being and destroy forever-presence, constructing patchworks outside striated spacetime. To end the pregiven registers of politics and philosophy, toward artistic, poetic and deviant registers. To begin ontophania. To new myths and new mediations.

[1] Martin Heidegger – What Is Called Thinking?

[2] Martin Heidegger – What Is Called Thinking?

[3] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n05/benjamin-kunkel/the-capitalocene

[4] Martin Heidegger – What Is Called Thinking?

[5] https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dasein-objects-and-myth-heideggers-unconscious-accelerationism/

[6] Duncan Bell – Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present

[7] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2021/02/15/institutional-oceanography/

[8] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2025/01/19/capital-as-autonomous-will/

[9] http://janushead.org/volume-13-issue-2/

[10] Miguel de Beistegui – Heidegger & the Political

[11] http://janushead.org/volume-13-issue-2/

[12] https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dasein-objects-and-myth-heideggers-unconscious-accelerationism/