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.

Our postmodern age is bringing forth a spatio-ontological shift that moves from expansion and negentropic escape (i.e. the capacity to expand order into new territories through colonisation, global interconnection and technological oversight) to an inertial position characterised by homogeneous geoscapes through the “global city” and metropolitics as the closing of the frontier. These are the spatial borders of what Escobar calls Globalistan, a configuration of “‘no places’ or ‘cities of nowhere,’ places that are ostensibly public but definitely non‐communitarian”[1]. While the growth of urbanisation and the development of city hubs suggests a growth and expansion in the normal operations of capitalist accumulation, the extremity of city growth and the demographic projections of urban dominance change this nature. Expansion is no longer geographic but instead temporal and ontological.

Utopia was a juxtaposition of the conspiracy thriller. Named after the Utopia Experiments, an in-story zine that documented and predicted a series of pandemics and diseases that afflicted human and animal demographics, it presented the existence of a shadow network (The Network) of scientists, politicians, intelligence agents and sleeper cells attempting to prevent the exposure of the second Utopia Experiments while at the same time directing public health policies toward an outcome of mass sterilisation.

Agency is the extension of the actant into a social relation, attempting to implement their desires and enact commitments. In this extension, the values and commitments of actants come up against those of others. Commitment as extension moves being from a passive subjectivity (caught within the flows of intercourse that formulate an advanced sentience) toward a referential agency (referencing the understanding of these flows as a form of sapience). A move from the limited individuation of a self-interested perspectival mode[1] toward a greater collective understanding with attendant conflicts and negotiations between different agents in these collective assemblages. This extends beyond the simple relations of human formations, into wider assemblages or paradigms as Latour describes them[2]. In paradigms, we see a wide field of potential actors producing relations and oppositions. Latour uses the story of a hotel manager, who in encouraging his guests to leave their room keys at the front desk before leaving the hotel, attempts various technological and social methods, from warning signs and reminders to changing the design of the keys themselves, adding a small weight which makes the keys bulkier and less desirable to carry around. These are the syntagms that are built upward in paradigmatic extensions. In these continual extensions, we see the emergence of an agential field, including not just the hotel manager but the lay out of the hotel (with added signs and reminders) and the construction and design of the key itself, producing a particular technical assemblage where the manager’s agency is mixed with a technicity of control.