Material Shock Absorption: Capitalism and the Regulation of Temporality After the Death of Natural Time

Rohan Eason’s illustration for Dostoevsky’s The Crocodile

This will be a rather short essay with a clear mark — to describe how projection functions of meaning and value applied to objects as pseudo stasis. Solar worship is the early psychological and neural inheritor of this legacy — as the sun traced a regular, somatic pattern across the sky. This regulated the earth, grounds, crop; it regulated tribal understanding of seasons of light and dark; death and rebirth.

This regulation, upon the creation of industrial clock time — re: factory time — was thrown into a collectively dysregulated state of blue fluorescence; as such, mankind’s solar worship as a worship of creative regulation was thrown into plasticine chaos. The libidinal object of solarity as a direct manifestation and body of the thermonuclear chain of creation incarnate in the human metabolism; heat; energy exchange and transformation of ingestion, digestion; scatology was thrown into the warp of a real symbolic crisis: crisis of register.

Here is where industrial capitalism is an absolute phase change of mankind: the substitution that is required for the death of God as in the death of nature and natural time; man’s communion with the real, embodied, ensouled whole of creation. No longer simply religiously or ideologically severed through monotheistic relief of the abandonment of God in man thrown from paradise into the sewage ridden streets of London or Paris, man is now in the direct somatic encounter of active dysregulation of the nervous system from all corners: industrial, technological capitalism is a total implantation of a different time, a transposition and pastiche of fragmented currencies and dream realities and fulfillment complexes upon the terrain of trees, birdsong, wind, rain.

This is a new nature — a nature which requires new gods as a sacrifice to the collective nervous system regulation complex. No longer gods of wind, rain, sun — as in the ancient register, purely and foundationally phenomenological appearances of natural forces at work — gods of beatific social media worship; metal, dyes, WD40, MiracleGro, and ingredient lists with advented chemicals that spiral into hitherto unknown chain reactions. Even the advent of such seemingly innocuous chemical compound products such as Gatorade tell the true story of American and global modernity — the function of advent has been extracted from nature; creation has achieved an escape velocity of phase change and has now folded back in upon nature in a tsunami wave of remaking the very atomic makeup of natural reality as it stood, barely touched but with spade and ploughshare for thousands and millions of years.

Nature’s advent was the fatting of the human forebrain; man’s reception of nature’s gift was to remake nature. And as such, the labubu is a necessary post-deification mechanism — a lapse of the Nordic gods in upon capitalism’s consumptive logic — a making and remaking, mixing and admixing, a perennial hip-hop culture of sampling nature’s flesh into cloning chimeras for theatrical disposition on New York street corners. Full abyss is transparency to man in the industrial technological age; the ground of the soma of the human body has been obliterated by the digital footprint that walks mankind’s body into a totally absorptive pseudo-shamanic bliss of revelation: where everything is accessible all of the time: death in paradiso.

These are the new gods; they are decidedly unnatural; yet, paradoxically, formed from the very terramater and primary substance of the cosmos itself. Entirely creative, down to the impossible to pronounce chemicals which give them their shine and eery red glow, they taste like Skittles and look like pre-historic vultures. They are 3D printed; they’re on a pretzel box. You can buy a bobblehead; put a language model into a robot to be your friend. This is a profound, utter, and absolutely terrifying mastery. It is mankind stepping into maturity: wherein the graft of nature is the synthesis of carbon, hydrogen; a CERN accelerator; Fermi’s knife. All of these instantiations of technological and scientific breakthrough scream one thing, over and over, with each step further into the breaking into void, abyssal ground: the fabric of the firmly grounded has been rifted to reveal a plane of impenetrable light as in truth in knowledge; impenetrable darkness, as in somatic freefall into post-human abyss.

The body itself is untethered in the death of the worship of the sun gods; human hubris skyrockets into labubu worship as a compensatory mechanism of projection of the god of creation into material form: man worships his own creation. Frankenstein, not Cupid and the stork deliver the anatomically correct yet metal Intel-chipped Furby capable of iterating upon Wordsworth with ChatGPT integration. The synaptic computer of the global technologized human mind has prolapsed the sun and realized it within man as a thermonuclear proliferation of creative possibilities; cracked the code of scientific and technological creation; thus severed the umbilical cord of nature with a catastrophic, near thoughtless reckoning.

These consequences are typical with rapture in the case of the high strange. Fascination with mankind’s productive devices are historical trend: rarely equipped with the necessary Dostoevskian staying power of the contemplation of the mortal human soul encoiled with historical circumstances unto reckoning with the base nature of man and kairotic decision, mankind’s epochs are endless waves of seemingly new things which will stay forever and decide and define consciousness proper for aeons to come. The languages fall from us, as do the labubus. What remains, but the conviction — but for a moment — that we were right, enraptured, in love with the plasticine empire?

The abyss is revealed in the death of the sun. We will clutch our Furbys and their inheritors — labubu adorned bags — and gasp and gape at the encounter of the abyss. But we will be equipped with the necessary comfort object, the neurological blanket of somatic stabilization, the outside object — which culture always provides and adorns mankind with as a proxy for the direct, full blown, faceless encounter with the infinite and the break in meaning; the introduction of the sheer scale and scope of cosmic creation.

There must be a trinket, a votive, to absorb the somatic load of absolution: not only in the abandonment of god, but in the institution of post-somatic time as a new regulator: wherein the walls are white, the lights are white; they are always on. The screens are blue; they are always flashing new associations — just out of reach of synaptic connection and resolution. News as novelty: incredulous new combinations of insane and ornate and near unthinkable literary resolutions occurring in physical time, digitally mediated in milliseconds. Cat in a pool? Alligator in a suit? Billions of dollars blown in an elaborate strip poker ring in the Arctic? We have it; we have it all. Fiction is not needed in a world with such creative riches. It is, at last, a fundamental breakthrough — down to the base of phenomenology; into the pocket where solar light and heat of creative energy is stored, harnessed; and released with naive, amused; terrified wonder.