“‘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]

Logistics is the logic of a postmodern future. A forever recurring pastiche of administrative management and ideological machines[1] churning out data points. The multiplication of problems running beyond logistical control suggests hard limits to the possibilities politics presents, whether on environmental, virological or ontological registers.

Transformative semalgebraic ontology posits transformation as “the primary ontological primitive: to be is to be transformable, and what we call entities are stable regions within fields of admissible variation”[1]. Bonisoli begins constructing a semantic algebra to understand the nature of transformations, looking toward a general apparatus that incorporates numerical-quantitative frameworks into a semanticisation of ontological transformations. Enframing this apparatus in a set of nested convergences, invoking Euclidean geometry as a fold of Riemannian space, there is an attempt to move beyond metaphor into a fully semantic-algebraic topology of relations and conditions.

Concepts of vital materialism and objectness place the ontological claim of the other at its most extreme point. The collapse of the distinction between life and matter, and further the subject/object opposition, presents an elevation of the multiplicity of being to a level of equality with the traditional conceptions of life. With this elevation comes new obligations and relations to instantiate the place of the claim as not just an ontological exploration but a political mechanism that displaces sapient reasoning as the dominant mode of existence.

Thoughts are the totality of the world. The capacity to think, beneath rationalisation or abstraction, is both creative and deductive. We create things with thoughts deduced from the prior apparatuses of logic and reality in which we find ourselves. Thinking is exploratory but bounded, our being always limited by the obstacles that explorers meet – vast oceans, jagged peaks, hostile environments. This is the irony of the will – to be creatively enmeshed in its limits. “The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world”[1].

Modernity, equality and democracy are viruses, parasitical assemblages atop a decaying civilisational corpse. Their corollaries of identity and universality are appendages that give a veneer of control, an idea of integrable destiny commonly referred to as humanity. This moves beyond the realms of politics or conspiracy, down to ontological potentiality and the constituted facts of being. Projects of posthumanism or the decentring of agency still grasp at the universality of a milieu.

“I found that this result nicely illustrated the strength of our approach as compared to a typical paleontological analysis. We used clearly defined assumptions and drew conclusions that were bounded by probabilities. Nothing approaching this in rigor could be done using morphological features of bones. Many paleontologists liked to portray what they did as rigorous science, but the very fact that they had been unable to agree on the occurrence of a genetic contribution from Neanderthals to present-day humans despite at least two decades of debate illustrated that their approach had big limitations”[1].

“In looking at a waterfall we imagine that there is freedom of will and fancy in the countless turnings, twistings, and breakings of the waves; but everything is compulsory, every movement can be mathematically calculated. So it is also with human actions; one would have to be able to calculate every single action beforehand if one were all-knowing; equally so all progress of knowledge, every error, all malice”[1].

“It is possible that all humanity is only a phase of development of a certain species of animal of limited duration”[1]. Or a certain type of will of limited duration. Space-time compression is the emergence of industrial singularities that move beyond the individual frame of reference, becoming scalar abstractions ranging from collective arrangements (joint stock companies) to informational-industrial complexes. The unifying aspect of this is capital as an abstracting force.

Every revolution and settlement has centred egalitarianism as the ideological archetype. “The human species is a single-status moral community”[1]. This goes beyond political ideology, expanding into cultural, religious and individual domains. A legal infrastructure has grown from the basis of universal human rights, endlessly developing new modi operandi based on self-referential criteria that moves beyond the nation-state. Identity is expressed in a comparative matrix of dividuated[2] parameters. Birth and biology are plasticised as mere tools or inconveniencies to be modulated.