The Map is Indestructible

Reflections on O.G. Rose's latest work

In the jungle of Global Pluralism, which way will you (Map) Drive, modern subject?!

---

This article is based on the book by

O.G. Rose

The Map Is Indestructible. Pick up a copy here: The Map Is Indestructible.

The Portal will be hosting Dylan Shaul dedicated to many themes relevant to this article. To get involved this August, see: Metaphysics Resurrected.

---

“We enjoy our ideology.

We abhor the real.

Given that: how might we map-make better?”

0. Rational Maps as the Human’s “Spider Web”

O.G. Rose’s latest work, The Map Is Indestructible, forces us into thinking the reason why we find ourselves as thinking beings at all (the importance of thought reflecting itself). Consider for a moment if our mental maps were directly the territory of the real. In this situation we would not need to think at all because there would be no gap between our map (itself produced by thought) and the territory (given to us as nature). Thus, the logical opening for The Map Is Indestructible is “the map isn’t the territory”, first attributed to philosopher Alfred Korzybski.¹ “The map is not the territory” is the precondition for all actual thinking.

However, another question immediately arises here: if there is a gap between our maps and the territory, and this gap is the precondition for all actual thinking, then why do we find so many people who are averse to actually thinking? To state it in the terms that run throughout Rose’s work, why do we see so many people attempting to reify “coherent maps” that are exactly equal to the territory as opposed to engaging the work of thought in the work of situating an alignment or correspondence between one’s map and the territory?²

This question runs throughout The Map Is Indestructible as well as this reflection on the work.

One could of course consult Žižek here, who functions as an inspiration for both the core of Rose’s text, as well as its body throughout, in that, to state it very plainly: we enjoy our ideology (i.e. we get a libidinal satisfaction from our “coherent maps”).³ But even that does not get precisely to the “whole story”, in that we do “enjoy our ideology”, but even more, we abhor the real. In other words, we could say something like: we love to construct coherent maps because the real is too much.⁴ From Rose directly:⁵

““Maps” are natural, say because “The Real” is too much.”

Given these presuppositions: we enjoy our ideology, and we abhor the real; given these presuppositions: the map is not the territory, and people spontaneously construct maps; Rose invites us into a journey: how might we we “map-make better”.⁶

This is neither a progressive project of “making the ultimate map to realise the revolution” (e.g. communists overthrowing capitalism); and nor is it a conservative project of “making maps great again” (e.g. MAGA). Instead, given the aforementioned presuppositions, we can say that there will never be a map that can realise the revolution, and also, maps were never great. So again, in this context: how might we learn how to “map-make better”?

In reflecting this issue, I am spontaneously reminded of a story from my studies in evolutionary biology, where researchers (perhaps unethically), attempted to test how a spider would behave if all of its webbing were removed from the structure of its anatomy. To perhaps their and our surprise, or not, the spider without the capacity to spin a web, attempted to go through the motions anyway (i.e. it attempted to spin a web even though it had no capacity to spin a web). We can infer from this study that, “spiders spin webs” “automatically”, “instinctually”. We can infer that the activity of spinning webs for spiders is given whether the webbing is present or not.

From this example, I want to propose that pre-modern map-making was somewhat equivalent to a spider instinctually spinning a web; and I want to propose that post-modern map-making is somewhat equivalent to a spider spinning a web after the webbing has been surgically removed (not by biologists, but by philosophers).

At the same time, I want to propose that the truth of the modern project, as hyper-focused on reason as it was and is, was and is the attempt, or more accurately, the challenge, of becoming better map-makers (due to the very fact that the “map is indestructible” or “our reason is indestructible”). To become better map-makers is not to fall into the trap of what Rose will call throughout his work, “autonomous rationality”, but rather to see “the reason in things/situations”, even if it does not (yet), or cannot (in principle), become integrated or incorporated into one’s map qua rationality.⁷

The challenge here should be clear: if we were to really be worthy of and take up the modernist project (to realise it), we would have to become better map-makers by both working within a limited reason (instead of unconsciously spinning a perfectly coherent “web” as the territory),⁸ as well as conceiving of this limited reason as positive (instead of reflexively removing our “webbing” because we recognised that we can never spin a perfectly coherent web as the territory).

For those well-versed in the history of thought and philosophy, you will have already made the association that this metaphor is pointing towards: pre-modern map making is what modernism reacted to as “dogma”, and the post-modern map making is what could be referred to as the “deconstruction” of modernism. Historically speaking, we reacted against pre-modern dogma because we recognised that it was a metaphysics without correlation to the total social body of humanity, as well as justified a certain political order that prevented the realisation of the total social body of humanity; but we reacted against the modern project of becoming better map-makers because we ultimately failed to live up to our potential, and decided that it would be best to neuter ourselves of our own special map-making powers.⁹

Rose’s project in The Map Is Indestructible forces us to re-confront this challenge of the abandoned modernist project. For Rose, if we do not, we face the problem of “isolation” in “Global Pluralism” — since we cannot help but “spin our webs”, to make our “coherent maps” — and we will not tolerate the social negativity when the real presents us with antinomic relations; and we face the problem of (psychotic) “conspiracy” (imagining correlations that do not exist) or “tribalism” (forming social cults) as an attempt to reclaim the social noumenon that is imagined to be stolen from us by modern liberalism. Framing the challenge positively, for Rose, we need to become the type of subjects that can engage “dialectical (non)-rationality and situation”.¹⁰

Let us break down this positive challenge towards becoming better map-makers, concept by concept:

• Dialectical

• (Non)-rationality

• Situation

“Dialectical” here is pointing towards the dynamic structure of rationality; to be dialectical means that one’s thought is moving with identity in the unity of opposites (Rose often expresses this by contrasting A/A and A/B, with A/A representing a self-similar and self-enclosed rational identity, and A/B representing a dialectical and contradictory rational identity).

“(Non)-rationality” represents the fact that even the dialectical structure of rationality is limited, and is being cultivated in order to bring itself into alignment or correspondence with the truth of the real (here Rose will often juxtapose “coherence” as rational with “correspondence” as truthful).

Finally, “situation” is in many ways replacing the domain of “things”, where the “geometry of a situation” is often juxtaposed against “algebraic thing-hood”. In many ways the “shape or form” of “the real” is the “geometry of the situation” in which a subject must bring a dynamic structure of rationality towards a truth of the real that is not yet (or potentially in principle impossible to) cohere with one’s identity. The result, for Rose, is that becoming “better map-makers” would allow us to be better “form makers” (rational-truths) out of “real situations”.

Taken as a whole, the triad of “dialectical”, “(non)-rational”, and “situation” may correspond to Hegel’s “abstract”, “negative”, and “concrete”. Here we could think of the dialectical as in-and-for-itself a (necessary) abstraction, which is put in service of its own limitation (non-rational) — what is from its point of view “negative” — in order that it can potentially enrich the concrete situation (or relational geometry), in its irreducible and unreplicable, singularity.¹¹ The fact that everything is oriented towards what is irreducible and unreplicable, a singularity, means that this work could have positive universal implications for our relationship to both (what Rose calls) “The Situation of Capital”, as well as the emergence and dominance of artificial intelligence, which may be the realisation of “autonomous rationality”, forcing human beings to reflexively become better map-makers, that is map-makers of “rational-truths” derived from “real situations” (what the AI cannot access).

Throughout the beginning of the article I will try to work towards how the first three terms of Rose’s project: “Map Naturing”, “Map Sealing”, and “Map Vanishing” could be positioned better to help us understand both “Map Consistency” and “Map Situating”. Towards the end of the article I will consider how our failure at “Map Situating” leads to the problematic oscillation between “Map Totalisation” and “Map Proliferation” and ultimately the unthought aspect of the failure of “Map Situating”, “Map Drive”.

I take this article as a whole to orient towards: realising or becoming worthy of the modern project as becoming a subject of drive that can reflectively raise one’s nature as a map-maker towards the actual enrichment of the real via the truth that presents itself in unreplicable singularities qua situations.

The metaphor of the spider here, in that we are natural “web-spinners” qua “map-makers”, is utilised by Rose in the idea that we must learn to “weave with others” (as opposed to “catching flies”).¹² In other words, instead of creating the “perfect coherent map” (and using it to “catch the other”), or instead of “neutering ourselves of maps” (and using it to efface our involvement in creation); to become “better map-makers” involves “weaving” in the singularities presented to us by “the other”. In order to weave better with the other, Rose’s work invites us to a reflecting on the nature of our maps/reason so that we can understand its:

• Naturing

• Sealing

• Vanishing

• Consistency

• Situating

• Totalising

• Proliferation

• Drive

How I read the book’s meta-structure is as follows:

• Naturing-Sealing-Vanishing function as our spontaneous nature which will prove less likely given the situation of Global Pluralism

• Consistency was revealed as a central problem at the height of the modernist project but ultimately brings us to situational awareness

• Situating our cognition is the key and the most important result of the critique of rationality, but we have failed to situate our rationality theopolitically

• The result of the failure of Situating leads to first Totalising which is most clearly visible in 20th century politics, before breaking into Proliferation

• We are currently in the situation of Proliferating Totalisations which will either brings us to the truth of drive in the critique of desire or the war of all against all

• Ultimately to realise the modern project would be to bring Drive to Situation and in the process maximise rational-truths from our real situations

We’ll start with Map-Naturing.

(1) Map-Naturing

For Rose, the basic starting point is our “Map Nature”. He outlines the problem as follows:¹³

“We are all “mapmakers”, per se, which means we generate “internally consistent systems” in which we naturally “trap ourselves” so that we can feel safe, make sense of the world, and the like. With “maps”, humans trap themselves just by being human: we naturally generate “scripts” to gain social intelligibility — “internally consistent systems” are our sustenance.”

In liberal progressive society, many people avoid the problems of maps with the striving for or the acquisition of a permanent professional title (e.g. university professor, career politician, etc.). The permanent professional title is literally the pathway towards our “sustenance”. However, Rose warns us that in such situations we may be at risk of defending a specific identity as opposed to pursuing the truth (which could put our specific identity, as well as our “sustenance”, at risk).¹⁴ Indeed, in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), many who have chased a permanent professional title may be approaching this precise risk in that AI is likely to automate many repetitive cognitive tasks. Here we have looming “theopolitical” challenges: how are liberal professional identities to respond to the seemingly inevitable “AI-Capital” automation of most functions?

However, striving for and acquiring a permanent professional title is not the only way in which we can fall into the trap/temptation of defending a specific identity as opposed to pursuing the truth. In other words, it is not just a problem of liberal society or professionalisation. Rose suggests that strong religious and political identities, like “Christian” or “Atheist”, “Liberal” and “Conservative”, “Republican” or “Democrat”, while natural (expressions of our “Map Nature”) are precisely the way in which we can “truncate” both theological and political thought.¹⁵ By truncate theological and political thought this means that we are more interested in defending the coherence of our current identity then we are interested in the truth. Consequently, this might mean, in order to be better map-makers, we may need to go against our “Map Nature”. But how do we intelligently go against our very nature? Can we do it without losing our sustenance, both materially and spiritually?

From my point of view, this brings us to the necessity of philosophy, and specifically the mode of thought that philosophy has seemingly used in different eras (both ancient and modern), to deal with our “Map Natures”: dialectics. Dialectics is a mode of thinking that unifies opposites, not in erasing their difference, but by thinking in their tension and antagonism. Consider a concept like “Christian Atheism”. When I was first advertising for the Christian Atheism course, many Christians commented something like “this isn’t Christianity!” “this has nothing to do with Christianity!”; and many Atheists commented something like “Atheism means you don’t believe in Christ!” “Atheism cannot also be Christian!”. This is precisely how our “ordinary” “Map Natures” reacts to a “Dialectical Mapping”: it is an unnatural position. Those students in the course who wrestled with the antagonism of “Christian Atheism” were not being “indoctrinated into one worldview”, they were “learning to think dialectically” with a “concrete concept”.

Thus, for me, “Christian Atheism” is not so much an “identity” or a “rational coherence” representing my “true Map Nature”; it is more of a dynamical structure of rationality (dialectical) that allows one to train one’s mind towards the limit of one’s mind ((non)-rational). In the end, I think such training can ultimately help us serve the other more fruitfully, given the theological relational geometry (situation) — whether it calls for Christianity, or whether it calls for Atheism, or whether it calls for something in-between, both or neither — a truly dialectical mind will be best prepared.

Of course, this extends beyond thought related to theological concerns. Perhaps here we could get creative and propose a “dialectical training grounds” also in politics with concepts like (Žižek’s preferred identity) “moderately conservative communist” (from here on “Conservative Communist”). Concepts like “Christian Atheism” (theology) or “Conservative Communist” (politics) are both unnatural and also instructive insofar as that they open up the creative cultivation of thought in the unity of what our “Map Nature” would presuppose, from the point of view of “rational coherence”, as contradictory and irrational. How can you entertain both Christianity and Atheism? Conservatism and Communism? Here Rose seems to be calling for precisely the form of subjectivity that can handle contradictory and opposed theories and ideas without being “negatively affected by them”, so that they can work the negativity of the in-between space towards “new, intelligent, and creative edifices”.¹⁶ Instead of asking “How can you entertain both Christianity and Atheism?” or “How can you entertain both Conservatism and Communism?” perhaps we could ask something like: “what is possible if a life-long Christian thinks and communes with Atheists?” or “what is possible if a life-long Communist thinks and communes with Conservatives?”

Consequently, I think dialectical terms like “Christian Atheism” or “Conservative Communism” are dialectical structures of reason that can be strategically mobilised to avoid what Rose calls “Monotheorism” (i.e. “Christianity” as a “mono-theory”, or “Communism” as a “mono-theory”). “Monotheorism” is the belief that there “exists a single theory that can explain every given phenomenon” and/or “given event.”¹⁷ In the same way that we cannot help but spin our webs of reason, Rose suggests that we cannot help but be “monotheoristic”.¹⁸ Here we can easily think about Christians or Atheists, Conservatives or Communists, that give us the appearance of a giant spider spinning a web in order to catch us in its webbing. In these situations speech is used as a weapon and others are viewed as prey. Thus, in these situations, we never learn to speak freely, and our own capacity for self-understanding is undermined. We should not underestimate how our “Map Natures” presuppose a desire for self-similarity, and we should not underestimate how our “Map Natures” presuppose an equal disdain for self-other difference.

Practically speaking: if you are a Christian, can you cultivate real friendship with Communists? If you are a Communist, can you cultivate real friendship with Conservatives? Also, where would we draw the line? What is the condition of possibility for real friendship between such opposing viewpoints? What type of subject would I have to be?

Of course, if we are more interested in the truth than in our self-enclosed reasoning and self-similarity to the other, then we should in principle be open to seeing the way in which our Christianity can be enriched by Atheism (and vice versa); or the way in which our Conservatism can be enriched by Communism (and vice versa). I am using these examples for practical personal reasons but it is trivial to think of others, for example:

• A Platonist who can be enriched by a Deleuzian (and vice versa); as opposed to a Platonist who thinks a Deleuzian has nothing to teach me (and vice versa)

• A Hindu who can be enriched by a Buddhist (and vice versa); as opposed to a Hindu who thinks a Buddhist has nothing to teach me (and vice versa)

• A Democrat who can be enriched by a Monarchist (and vice versa); as opposed to a Democrat who thinks a Monarchist has nothing to teach me (and vice versa)

After all, in the way we are trying to think, that is in service of becoming “better map-makers”. When we refer to these terms, we are referring to abstractions, and these abstractions depend not only on ineffable final causes of the Good or the Beautiful, but on the truth of the negativity of the subject, in order to be put to use in concrete situations. In theo-political terms that I have experienced personally, perhaps Christian Conservatives who “other” Communist Atheists (and vice versa) are doomed to self-enclosure from all non-Christian Conservatives. Why does this happen? From my reading, because both hold the presuppositions that of course only “Christian Conservatives” or “Communist Atheists” have access to the pathway of the “True, Good, and Beautiful”, and of course the other is on a pathway that is “False, Evil, and Ugly”. Just look at the (political) tyranny! Just look at the (God) delusion!

In that process we let our “Map Nature”, as a first cause, cut off from the wealth of knowledge and understanding that in specific situations could prove invaluable. Is it possible that Christianity is not a total delusion? Is it possible that Communism is not nothing but tyranny?

This is not just an ideal thought experiment I am running, it is something that has proved beyond valuable for my own thinking (and my own sanity) vis-a-vis my own “Map Nature”.¹⁹ I have recalled elsewhere²⁰ that my own theo-political leanings towards something like “Communist Atheism” led me into insane deadlocks, trapped in a coherence that could not correspond to singular situations in anything resembling an enrichment. Moreover, since around 2016, while I still find myself gravitating towards the signifiers of “Communism” (post-capitalist society towards a more socialist society) or “Atheism” (the lack in the Other towards the immortal drive), I find it most enriching to inhabit, to indwell, in the world of “Christian Conservatism”.²¹ I feel like my “Communist Atheism” is made more robust with a deep contact in and with “Christian Conservatism”, which is why signifiers like “Christian Atheism”, and “Conservative Communist” seem to me like emancipatory dialectical concepts that can enrich many different singular situations, as opposed to rigid fixed identities designed to set traps for insular communities (overdetermined by my “Map Nature”).

This is not in contradiction with Rose’s project of encouraging us to become better map-makers, but seems to strike right at its very core:²²

“it is natural for us to make “maps” (using the term “map-naturing,” which is supposed to play on the idea that it is “our nature to map ‘maps’”), with a critical acknowledgement that we require “maps”, all while stressing their danger.”

Rose emphasises that while a person can “entertain multiple worldviews at once”, everyone in a way must have a “main worldview”, a “primary one from which such “entertainment” occurs”.²³ To once again give the example most relevant to my history, and to my personal interests, while I cannot not but perform something of a “Communist Atheist” theo-politics (i.e. my primary worldview), I can defend myself against myself, and the way I could weaponise my view against others, by allowing myself to be “fully entertained” by the domain of “Christian Conservatism” (and not as a larp, but as a genuine loss of myself into the other). Moreover, not only defend myself against myself, but also defend myself against non-dialectical Communists and Atheists, i.e. Communists who cannot entertain Conservatives, or Atheists who cannot entertain Christians.

While these are big ideas, Rose suggests that this work is the work, not of “monotheorism”, but rather of “small theory”. If “monotheorism” is trying to create a coherence from which to consume all others in its unconscious trap; then the practice of “small theory” is the practice of being a subject that can move dynamically in an ecology of theoretical environments.²⁴ In my experience, for example, I have been prone to situationally experimenting with “Christianity” and “Conservatism” when I am in an “Atheist” or a “Progressive” space; and I have been prone to experimenting with “Atheism” and “Communism” when I am in a more “Christian” or “Conservative” space. If done with a “graceful weaving”, the effects of this type of “small theory” can be quite glorious for thinking processes in the other (and perhaps a relief from the closed pressures and expectations of an unconscious monotheorism). For Rose, this is a naturally ecological approach to thinking that can potentially help facilitate “more intellectual competition and evolution”, as well as avoid a situation in which one theory can become “too big to fail”.²⁵

For this opening section on “Map Naturing”, I have mostly been reflecting dialectical structure as a necessity for our reason, but what it is really meant to prepare us for is thinking the (non)-rational truth of the other. Rose notes that, if we do not pass from a self-enclosed worldview (e.g. Christian Conservative, Communist Atheist), towards this dialectical dynamical structure of our reason, then we can easily be blocking negative affects (our own despair, anxiety, etc.), and/or only helping our idea of the other as opposed to the actual other.²⁶ In this, Rose’s work emphasises throughout that we’re always at the end of the day dealing with the non-dialectical core of “subjectivity all the way down”.²⁷ This means embracing and working with our own despair/anxiety, as well as sacrificing for the actual other, is in many ways “non-negotiable” on the level of becoming “better map-makers” capable of “weaving with others”. In the words of Rose:²⁸

“If “mapmaking” is human nature, then we are subjects “all the way down”, and that means we cannot escape the subjectivity which proves the source and creation of “maps”.”

If we are not to escape subjectivity, we need to learn about, not only the tendency of our “Map Nature”, but also our tendency to “Map Sealing”.

(2) Map Sealing

We previously linked the abstract moment of dialectical logic to the negative moment of the truth of the subject in the limitation of that very dialectical logic. In “Map Sealing”, Rose aims to demonstrate more clearly what is at stake in moving from our “Map Naturing” towards our tendency to “Map Sealing” in the very repression, foreclosure or disavowal of the the negativity of the subject. For Rose, this appears most profoundly in the nature of “death” and “apocalypse”:²⁹

“The rational and logical end where death and apocalypse begins; there, “the border of thinking” is reached.”

When we revisit the idea of the coherent map, and use specific examples like “Conservative Christian” or “Communist Atheist”, what is often sealed off in these maps is the subject’s own death or personal apocalypse with a certain “transcendental guarantee” (e.g. resurrection in heaven with Christ; or species-being in world communism). One might first protest with the idea that the “Communist Atheist”, for example, does not seal off one’s own death or personal apocalypse with a transcendental guarantee, but precisely overcomes this sealing off with a purely secular or naturalistic theo-political worldview. But what we often find in “Communist Atheist” thought involve presuppositions of the highest religious order or with the highest transcendental function. We should not forget that there were Soviet Cosmists who, while “Communist Atheists”, still believed that in World Communism the human being would become immortalised. Consider Žižek’s reflections on the topic:³⁰

“Bio-cosmism was openly propagated only in the first and in the last two decades of the Soviet rule; its main theses are: the goals of religion (collective paradise, overcoming of all suffering, full individual immortality, resurrection of the dead, victory over time and death, conquest of space far beyond the solar system) can be realised in terrestrial life through the development of modern science and technology.”

Indeed, we find these same ideas in Atheistic and Christian forms of transhumanism as well, even if most Atheistic and Christian forms of transhumanism are more liberal capitalist and less communist.³¹ The point here is that, in the general theo-political structure of these seemingly opposed views, there are sneaking presuppositions that seek to defend ourselves against the terror, the anxiety, the pain, of our own death and apocalypse. I myself spent years in my doctoral thesis speculating and thinking about the post-human world and realities, about the possible other evolutions that could emerge beyond the biocultural.³² I don’t think that this work or this direction is completely wrong-headed, and indeed, if a new form of evolution is possible, we better think it; but at the same time, it can become a way to avoid the antagonisms of the present.

Consequently, on some level, we can find in these worldviews the tendency to externalise our personal death and the apocalypse towards some imminent antagonism that will surely befall us all collectively unless our worldview wins. For example, Christian Conservatives can tell us that the apocalypse is near, that Jesus will return, and that all Communist Atheists will burn in hell for their heretical life ways and worldviews. While extreme and some might think a clear straw man, this view is actual and real. On the other hand, a Communist Atheist can say that we are in “late capitalism” and that, in some unholy alliance with artificial intelligence, we are being driven towards an immanent human extinction event without the immediate intervention of communist measures capable of limiting and constraining the global threat. The point here, and the point that Rose invites us to think regarding “Map Sealing”, is the tendency to mobilise death and apocalypse in order to justify the rational rules of the system we identify with as a coherent system or totality.³³ This is so dangerous because how can I prove that Jesus is not coming back? How can I prove that all Atheists will not burn in hell? How can I prove that communism is not immanent in the face of AI-Capital? How can prove that post-humanity is not immanent? I cannot, in reason, it is an impossibility.

To frame this as a question: what if Jesus is really coming back? What if AI-Capital is truly an existential threat? Rose suggests:³⁴

“We should never appeal to apocalyptic thinking unless “earned” by rationality and argumentation (which is rarely), and we should only make an appeal to the apocalypse directly when backed by incredible evidence (if even then).”

The problem with this form of “Map Sealing” is that we can make our rationality serve this non-rational core (typically the end of humanity in some way, so quite literally the end of the “rational theo-political animal”). Moreover, while this thinking seems to have been with us from time immemorial — part of the unreflective dialectical structure at the limiting madness of our being³⁵ — the concreteness of the problem that it presents to us today is truly overwhelming. We can easily conjure up many different believable doomsday scenarios (and by believable I mean “rationally coherent” in a “religious sense”). For example, Slavoj Žižek often runs off lists of these scenarios in a network of potential catastrophes that he refers to collectively as “commons problems”.³⁶ This can include everything from “climate change”, to “international migrants”, to “technological automation”, to “economic inequality”, and so forth. Žižek does this as a philosophical strategy that works almost like a “forcing function” for our “Map Natures”, i.e. forcing the subject towards its zero-point or self-relating negativity of our historical moment/breaking us out of the coherent webs of our rational totality, and into the disorienting and topsy-turvy field of our real world.³⁷

However, without philosophical cognition we can quickly become overwhelmed by the world that faces us, and either re-solidify into coherent ideologies that presuppose knowledge of the solution, or break into a nihilistic void. In many liminal web communities today, when all of these apocalyptic or dooms-day scenarios are thought together, we find signifiers like “poly-crisis”³⁸ and “meta-crisis”.³⁹ The poly/meta-crisis points towards some nebulous and vague, and at the same time, totalising and all-encompassing “apocalyptic scenario” that presumably involves overlapping ecological, sociological, technological, and economical dimensions. Whether thought of as commons problems forcing communism onto us,⁴⁰ or a poly-crisis that forces us to become more aware, reflective, and engaged subjects;⁴¹ we should keep in mind that what is easier than thinking about this overwhelming complexity, as well as the social and theo-political contradictions they imply, would be to assert an advanced knowledge of what all of these commons problems are pointing towards. For example, perhaps you think that the combination of climate change and immigration will lead to an immanent social breakdown, some “Mad Max” scenario where our cities are overrun by foreign gangs and cartels. Or perhaps you think that some combination of technological automation and economic inequality will lead to a type of post-human apocalypse or even a type of cosmic separatism where the richest will build an alternative biome on Mars while the Earth burns. For Rose, to become transfixed by these “global negativities” as “inevitable outcomes” is to be on a fast track to “Map Sealing” that again allows one to avoid the real difficult “micro-negativities” of the other.

Here the general point is that when we assert some advanced knowledge of what all these commons problems are pointing towards, we shut down thinking about the complexities and the contradictions and we assert a necessary action. From Rose:⁴²

“If the world will end if we do not do x, there is no debate: we must do x. In this way apocalyptic thinking absolves me the responsibility to debate, to think through my ideas, and to learn civility.”

In our situation, where it clearly seems true that our world is becoming so complex that we cannot possibly understand how all of these different dimensions will overlap and effect each other, how should we as subjects ethically navigate the zero-point of death and apocalypse? I know for example that the combination of climate change, economic inequality, asymmetrical social migration, technological automation, impasses of democracy, and so forth, and all combined, lead to a future that does not look ideal. Moreover, and all combined, these trends do not lead anywhere close to the romantic images of a great future world envisioned by scientists and technologists in the 20th century and early 21st century:

• a world where we learned to stabilise a symbiosis between a planetary species and our biosphere,

• a world where we learned to distribute resources for the total social body of humanity,

• a world where social migration was done out of curiosity and interest, and with respect and integrity for other cultures and peoples, and not out not out of a violent desperate necessity,

• a world where the excess productivity of technological automation was put into service of human socialist potentials as opposed to captured by a capitalist or feudal elite

• a world were governmental systems were better refined towards higher capacities for democratic representation on all levels of society as opposed to captured by the interests of corporations, etc.

Perhaps instead of becoming overwhelmed by the “absolute negativity” of the real, we bite off what little pieces of negativity we can actually chew? To be precise, if we stay in our spontaneous “Map Nature” without dialectical logic, and if we also “Map Seal” using an externalised negativity of death and apocalypse, then we would naturally be sealing ourselves off in a deep sense from both our body and the other. Perhaps in situations where we use intellectual abstractions to cut and seal off from the social body, we actually make things worse, and it becomes inevitable that we start to become haunted by fantasms of the most brutal and vicious kinds, as a return of what was repressed? For example, while it is clearly true that we are all drowning in very real commons problems, and while our shared world is perhaps best described as undergoing a poly-crisis, it is also evident that many of us still live fairly sheltered and even privileged lives when compared to the lives of most of our ancestors. Perhaps we need to reflect on the fact that the world we live in is progress, it is just that progress in this world is not marked by a non-problematic utopia, but higher levels of contradiction forcing us to investigate in new ways of being in truth with the human condition?

On my path, I, after getting overwhelmed by the “commons problems” and “poly-crisis”, started to reflect back on what I as an individual subject could realistically take on to become more truthful given this situation. While I could not do anything about the consequences of global warming, or economic inequality, or social migration, or democratic crisis, or technological automation, I could focus on my relation to sexuality and intimate otherness, and work up from there. What we find when we take seriously sexuality and intimate otherness is an internal relation to “death and apocalypse”: who can I live with “unto death”, or how can I live “unto death” (my own personal apocalypse)? Moreover, in that work, how do I become the type of person that can extend myself more fully in the social networks in which I participate? Ultimately, this is pointing towards the importance of not avoiding “micro-negativities” with a “macro-negativity”.

I am not saying that by focusing on the “micro-negativities” you can avoid or stop thinking about the “macro-negativities”, but it may help one think about the “macro-negativities” without “Map Sealing”. The ultimate point is that we must confront these “macro-negativities”, but we must do it in such a way that we avoid the temptation to “Map Seal” our “Map Nature”, e.g. economic inequality means we need World Communism now; social migration means we need White Ethno-Nationalism now; technological automation means that I will be uploaded to the Technological Singularity; the collapse of democracy means we need to reinstitute Monarchy now, etc. In this context, it is very hard to have productive dialogues about the very real problems we collectively face and must think.

Rose not only speaks from this very locus, but unfolds for us practical examples of how this foundation can be a way to approach the “apocalyptic poly-crisis” from the standpoint of a speech that is not trying to assert the necessary end times over the other to win the argument, but rather to really pursue the truth of our situation and times.⁴³ For Rose, the reason it is easier to assert definitive knowledge of the apocalyptic poly-crisis is because it is actually very difficult to have good conversations about it that do not end up in simple and unreflective displays of dominance. Rose tells us that displays of dominance in complex conversations can come in the form of “explicit disagreement”, “using emotions”, and “appealing to authorities”.⁴⁴ Moreover, Rose reminds us, that “the sooner I take a dominant strategy”, “the sooner I cease to be vulnerable”.⁴⁵ In this context, perhaps we should extend the notion of training grounds from dialectical reasoning to dialectical reasoning with one’s own absolute negativity in order to overcome not only one’s “Map Nature”, but also to overcome one’s inner inclination towards dominance over the situation via “Map Sealing”, towards the capacity for vulnerability towards the situation.

To put it very simply: how can we develop concrete singular relations with others that represent vehicles for us to learn to befriend vulnerability, impotence, weakness, and unknowing; and avoid creating a sealed off map mobilising us towards a certain action to avoid immanent doom. Considering that we accept the presupposition of a world dominated by “commons problems” and a “poly-crisis”, the only real way for our maps to correspond to such a world, is to accept a subjective disposition of self-relating negativity, to accept that I do not know what to do, let alone know what the whole of humanity should do. For Rose, this involves not only “more vulnerability”, but also “more time and work”, “risk of social status”, and the very real threat towards our own “fixed beliefs”.⁴⁶ While Rose admits that this is “existentially terrifying”, he also suggests that if we cannot, as a society, learn to live with and think with this type of existential terror, that the result will be that we have to “learn to live with the terror of power”⁴⁷ (which again, often represents the illusion of someone who pretends to know the answers to all our commons problems/the poly-crisis, etc.).

Rose ends the section with the following important reflection:⁴⁸

“The point is that we map-make (due to our natures) and then map-seal via “dominant strategies” and “power moves” which we can frame as moral so that we can conceal to ourselves what we are doing.”

In this context, we should remember that the “stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing”, is not the same thing at taking a long and hard look at “what we are actually doing” (to both ourselves and the other). If we are to catch a look, we need to know more about our tendency to “Map Vanishing”.

(3) Map Vanishing

Our “Map Natures” are to form a “coherent map” (“Christian Conservative”, “Communist Atheist”); our “Map Sealing” is to mobilise “X” (death, apocalypse) to fit the identity of our rationality (“Christ is coming back"!” “The end is near!” “AI is leading to post-humanity!”). For Rose, the next move to reflect is “Map Vanishing”:⁴⁹

“Once we map-seal […] the next way to strengthen our “maps” and make them “indestructible” is by engaging in map-vanishing, which is to say by making “our map vanish as map” into rather “is-ness”.”

First, it is important to note that making one’s map into “is-ness” versus bringing one’s map to confront the gap between one’s map (the ideology we enjoy) and “is-ness” (the real we abhor) is the whole gap constituting the “phenomenological journey” (re: Phenomenology of Spirit).⁵⁰

Second, it is important to note that if our “Map Natures” are aligned with an inability to structure our reason dialectically, and if our “Map Sealing” is related to an inability to engage the work of self-relating negativity, then our “Map Vanishing” is the magic trick where we pretend we are “weaving with others” when in reality we are using our “map as is-ness” to avoid the “is-ness” of actual others. In Lacanian terms, we are making our map into a “big Other”, instead of engaging with “little others” (and the pesky reality of their object-cause of desire). Throughout the section on “Map Vanishing”, Rose outlines some of the reasons for this obfuscation, including:

• The tendency/temptation to see the world as one monotheory instead of engaging the hard work of particularities (like an analyst out of the clinic)⁵¹

• The tendency/temptation to see one’s map as both “justified” and “complete” as opposed to “unjustified” and “incomplete”⁵²

• The tendency/temptation to be motivated by our own self-interest as opposed to cultivating curiosity in the other’s difference/disagreement as legitimate⁵³

• The tendency/temptation to find common ground in shared mapping as opposed to shared lacking⁵⁴

• The tendency/temptation to use thought to crush/avoid feeling (lack) as opposed to seeing our thinking in a unity with feeling (lack)⁵⁵

The emphasis here on “tendency” to “temptation” is here to be thought precisely on the level where “Map Sealing” (with “X” death/apocalypse) leads to “Map Vanishing” (into “is-ness as the real”) in “biting the apple” (Adam) or “refusing the cross” (Christ). Basically, when we take our “Map Nature” as “rationally coherent” and then “seal it ” with the “non-rational kernel” (external death, apocalypse), we then “bite the apple” + “avoid the cross” in “Map Vanishing”.

In this situation: we blind ourselves to the other, as opposed to emptying ourselves (kenosis) for the other.

In this situation: we create the illusion of social weaving when really we are just catching flies, as opposed to actual weaving with concrete singularities towards a real shared world.

The way out of this trap is also crucially linked to the key of the Phenomenology of Spirit, insofar as what we find in this “phenomenological journey” is the “traversal of error” via self-relating negativity that is actually positive for the realisation of subjectivity as “absolute knowing” (something Rose will stress throughout The Map Is Indestructible). The crucial turn (and responsibility) is the capacity to both (1) recognise that pre-modern thought oftentimes relied/relies on a rational coherence (map) that attempted/attempts a pure defence of subjective error, and (2) that subject error is actually the path towards real relationality because it is in error that we can better align/correspond our maps in truth to the real. Rose reflects the first challenge precisely:⁵⁶

“Everyone we know (and seemingly the entire world) use the word “subjective” as a simile for “error”.”

And the second challenge to its very core:⁵⁷

“If we cannot doubt everything, that would suggest why humans so naturally engage in “ideology preservation”, and furthermore if there is likely always some “core belief” that is never deconstructed, no matter what we doubt and/or deconstruct, the whole worldview will easily “spring bak to life form out of that very core”.”

The gift and the curse of our situation, for Rose, is that if the tactics of our “Map Natures” leading to “Map Sealing” and ultimately to “Map Vanishing”, then this tendency/temptation (probably a spontaneous dialectic of our nature), is, as suggested at the outset, unlikely to succeed or work throughout an entire lifetime in our current age of “Global Pluralism”. For Rose, they refer to this age as the “Age of Maps” expressed as “Global Pluralism”.⁵⁸ “Global Pluralism” in the “Age of Maps” is where you are aware of and also constantly surrounded by different maps, and not only different maps, but maps that absolutely contradict the truth of your map (e.g. Christian vs. Atheist, Conservative vs. Communist, Platonist vs. Deleuzian, etc.). In short, it is hard to make our “Maps Vanish” when we are constantly reminded of different maps that will naturally disrupt the coherence of our maps, and in the process, reveal that actually our map is not “is-ness” but rather our particular ideological defence from “is-ness” as such.⁵⁹

In order to walk through this dialectic of “Map-Natures/Sealing/Vanishing”, let me reflect two stories from my life that have led me to my current subjective location. The first is the story of how I became an adherent to the “Evolutionary worldview”, and the second story is how that worldview not only “became visible to me”, but also helped me recognise the difference between “vanishing into a big Other” and the capacity to “weave with others”.

I have told the first story in a condensed way in the Preface of Global Brain Singularity.⁶⁰ What it entails is the coming into intellectual maturation as a young man, searching for a worldview (as is our “Map Nature”), and finding two competing worldviews that helped me think a clear difference: the Christian worldview offering the perspective of “Intelligent Design” (of Nature),⁶¹ and the Evolutionary worldview offering the perspective of the “Natural Selection” (of Nature).⁶² In this confrontation, it is not irrelevant that I had an actual representative and elder of the Christian worldview, and also an actual representative and elder of the Evolutionary worldview, and I was in active dialogue with both figures in tarrying with these realities. Ultimately, due to a confluence of forces, some of which were rational and logical aspects of reflective cognition, and some of which were irrational and illogical truths of my subjectivity, I found myself aligning with the Evolutionary worldview over the Christian worldview (instead of thinking about them in a dialectical unity). My “Map Nature” had been realised in a “rationally coherent inhabitation” which found a concrete position as an undergraduate studying the evolution of humans in an anthropology department (as opposed to say an undergraduate studying theological systems in a religious department).⁶³

However, what immediately emerged from me and my “Map Nature” was the way my map attempted to “Map Seal” via what I learned or came to understand about the “X” (death/apocalypse) of the Evolutionary worldview: transhumanism. For me, this came about in reading the work of Ray Kurzweil, and specifically the book The Singularity Is Near,⁶⁴ which both worked with foundational Darwinian principles, applying the logic of natural selection to biology, but radically extended it to the “cosmos at large” — evolution from the “Big Bang to Global Civilisation”⁶⁵ — and towards the idea of technological singularity.⁶⁶ The idea is that evolution does not just apply to biology but also to culture and technology. Here the evolution of culture and technology leads us towards a post-human reality where, for Kurzweil — specifically the combination of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) with artificial general intelligence (AGI) — operates as a mix that leads to either the evolution of biological humans towards “trans humanity”, or in other scenarios, forms of “post-humanity”. In moving from my “Map Nature” to my “Map Sealing”, my work found yet another concrete position as working in a doctoral program reflecting on the problems of technological singularity from an anthropological perspective.⁶⁷

In the context of Rose’s “Map Natures” to “Map Sealing” we find a way in which the Evolutionary worldview seals itself to the X of a horizon beyond the problem of human maps. If one studies carefully my doctoral thesis, you will see that this problem started to become salient to me in-between “Part 3” “Signs of a New Evolution” — which outlines a speculative hypothesis for the next phase of “technocultural” evolution⁶⁸ — and “Part 4” “Field of Twenty-First Century Knowledge” — which started to take up the problem of maps themselves.⁶⁹

Why did this happen? Or more precisely: how did I become aware of the problem of maps themselves?

This moves us into the second story, where “my worldview became visible” in the difference between “vanishing into a big Other” and the capacity to “weave with others”. First, when I started my doctorate, itself situated in a type of “Map Sealing” via the “X” of “transhumanism”, I had also started experimenting with psychedelics, and specifically experimenting with ayahuasca in the context of a Christian community in Europe.⁷⁰ In experimenting with psychedelics, we could say that my entire “Map Nature” and “Map Sealing” was “Unsealed” and “Revealed” to me. After these experiences, not only could I not unsee my own map, but the maps of others also became hyper-visible to me. One could say that the “realm of the symbolic” gained a higher visibility to me in general. It is not that problems of language or the symbolic were totally off my radar before these experiences, but it is almost as if the depths of the significance of the “realm of the symbolic” (or the realm of map-making) became unavoidable and hyper-salient. In the context of the move from “Map Sealing” to “Map Vanishing”, I could no longer ignore the fact that my map was not territory, and my map had a territory of its own, that was both enabling me certain opportunities (like my doctoral training) and limiting me (perhaps on the level of pursuit of truth).

At great professional cost, I choose to pursue the truth. On a personal level, there was also a cost: I was forced to inhabit the gap (personal death) of the fact that my map was not the territory, and consequently, I could not vanish into it. Moreover, where I would have found myself if I did vanish into it, was the realm of the big Other in the form of the academic structures that were supporting the development of the Evolutionary worldview (both as historical, as well as sealed off in the “X” of transhumanism). While these costs were high, they were also a price I was willing to pay for feeling my way into a new capacity of relating. Perhaps the first concrete example and result of this new capacity for relating was the emergence of the book Sex, Masculinity, God — a trialogue with two very different men struggling with their own notions of masculinity⁷¹ — as well as experimentation with my intellectual work outside of academia as the big Other or container for that work (which itself opened up a field of new collaborative potentials).

Coming back around to the work of Rose and The Map Is Indestructible, I share this story because of how he ends his own reflections on “Map Vanishing”: not only is it increasingly impossible today to make our maps vanish (because we are confronted with such a recognisable realm of map-difference as the very “is-ness” of our political moment), but also because we must avoid this temptation if we are to become the type of subjects capable of relating to “Global Pluralism”. Here we should not understand “Global Pluralism” as simply the perspective of the antagonism between different “Religious worldviews” (e.g. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc.), and we should not understand “Global Pluralism” as simply the perspective of the antagonism between the “Religious worldview” and the “Evolutionary worldview” (e.g. Christians vs. Atheists); but rather to see that it brings us to the challenge of our own subjective relationship to our “Map Nature”, “Map Sealing”, and “Map Vanishing” (how am I “disappearing myself” prematurely?). Can we become the types of subjects that, as opposed to “vanishing into our maps”, rather cultivate the capacity for a “subjective map-weaving” with others? From Rose:⁷²

“Does this mean Global Pluralism is bad or good? Perhaps good if we’re ready for it; otherwise, we’ll find ourselves facing “visible maps” without the capacity to negate/sublate anxiety into higher ways of working with the self and the world.”

In order to become the type of subjects that can negate/sublate anxiety into higher ways of working with both self and the world, we must, according to Rose:⁷³

“see a necessary “break” between “the true” and “the rational”, which suggests the existence of “maps” requires a dialectic which we might not have noticed or thought through.”

To frame this in the context of my own story, it is natural and rational for humans to want to take the complexity of the world and organise it into a coherent frame; it is natural and rational for humans to want to seal-off this worldview with a specific knowledge of what the future is or will be; and it is natural and rational for humans to want to vanish into this map under the safety and security of a big Other as is-ness. But that path is not aligned or correlated with the truth, which requires seeing our coherent frames as partial and incomplete (producing real oppositions and tensions); which requires seeing our sealed off “X” as an irrational kernel that operates in the fact that our coherent frames are not the full pictures; and which requires seeing that our own self-vanishing into these maps prevents us from seeing the actual incomplete world before us, which is itself populated by real others.

The first step out of the the dialectic of “Map-Natures, Sealing, Vanishing”, is learning how we might move from a “Map Nature” of “rational coherence” towards “Map Consistency”.

(4) Map Consistency

This section focused on “Map Consistency” brings is to both the problem outlined in the sub-title of Rose’s book, The Problem of Internally-Consistent Systems, and also the resolution, to move from “internal consistency” to “situational consistency”, which forces the “internally-consistent system” to “cor-respond” to the real of the situation itself. In this way, this section on “Map Consistency” cannot be de-linked from its essential relation to where we go next: “Map Situating”.

However, and at the same time, let us not get ahead of ourselves. First, if “coherence” brings the idea of a “spatial unification or whole”, to be “consistent” often means to “act in the same way over time”. The “problem” with “internal consistency” is that if one is constantly “acting the same way over time” irrespective of the real of a situation, then this is something that quickly becomes a “delusional coherence” (and so we fall back into the same problem with our Map Natures, this time via time rather than space).

There are many ways in which we can avoid the problem of our “Map Nature” with “consistency” (time) as opposed to “coherence” (space). Throughout this section Rose will use mathematics as a key example of a domain that achieves “self-consistency” but does not think deeply enough about its correspondence to real situations.⁷⁴ In Rose’s terms when one uses one’s map to build a consistency independent of real situations, one becomes a “free floating point”.⁷⁵ He furthermore states that real consistency can never really work without thinking situations because “we are always dealing with “situations” and “consistency””⁷⁶, which again points back to the irreducible links between “Map Consistency” and “Map Situating”. Indeed, for Rose, this may bring us to what feels like the central point of the book as a whole, as well as blessing the work with its title:⁷⁷

“What is the point of this speculation? […] At no level of reality can we avoid “consistency” and/or “relations”, which means we must always deal with maps (and so “the problem of internally consistent systems”) — hence, “the map is indestructible”, because situation is reality.”

The problem that presents itself on the other side of “internal consistency”, that is the problem of “consistency in relation to situations”, is that it is impossible for us to achieve “perfection”, and it is impossible for us to not be “ideological”.⁷⁸ Such a meta-situation demands the rigour of a science, a science of the subject and of ideation. Here Rose leans on the work of the aforementioned Alfred Korzybski, and his Science and Sanity, but also Hegel’s Science of Logic, to think precisely about the relationship between self-consistency and real situations.⁷⁹ In this work, he brings an extensive attention to the problem internal to mathematics via Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and also Gödel’s rejection of the Principia Mathematica, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, on the basis that one cannot ground a consistent mathematical model without self-reference, i.e. that a consistent mathematical model without self-reference is itself self-refuting.⁸⁰ On the terms of Hegel and Korzybski, the same principle can be extended to philosophy, theology, science, or any other field whatsoever. While internal consistency can be “rational”, in relation to the self-identifying with that rationale, it becomes contextually “irrational” on the level of truth. Rose states:⁸¹

“the consistency of the model entails that which suggests that model isn’t consistent “as true” (the consistency can entail inconsistency as consistent), “(in)consistent”, if you will).”

In this context, it is thus not enough to build up a repetitive pattern that can be perfectly predicted, but rather to build up a repetitive pattern that can itself withstand shocks and surprises (however imperfect that will always be). Even better: to build up a repetitive pattern that is itself capable of engaging shocks and surprises (that has built within itself the otherness of shock and surprise). This requires a type of “absolutisation” of “self-reference” (or subjectivity) vis-a-vis “system”, which is the only thing that can provide “justification” in a correct relation to the otherness or the outside (qua shock and surprise). Here Rose states:⁸²

“How that consistency is justified cannot be through a formal system: something “other” and “outside” is always needed.”

This means any deterministic system has to reconcile with indeterminacy, leading us to the idea that Hegel’s logic and Korzybski’s science, is one that reflects an on-going attempt of humanity to reconcile with a movement from classical physics, based on a deterministic system, towards quantum physics, based on a fundamental and irreducible indeterminacy (i.e. quantum waves/oscillations). For Rose, the more the human subject can accept an “essential inconsistency” in relation to “consistency” the more “accurate, skilful, and true” they can become in relation to real situations.⁸³ What starts to emerge here are “two sides of an equation”:

• on the one side we have the “indestructible map” which is “our nature” we always try to “seal and vanish” (ultimately via consistency); and

• on the other side we have the “indeterminate real” which is always a source of “shock and surprise”.

On the one side, we need a map to provide us with a sense of consistency; and on the other side, we need to make room within that map for the real disturbances to that consistency. To “balance both sides”, seems to be the main point for Rose on the issue of “consistency”:⁸⁴

“We could say that the Real requires surprise, and hence it requires consistency and regularity to be possible; thus a map.”

Since Rose explicitly and extensively references Hegel’s Science of Logic in this section, as well as my text Systems and Subjects, under the banner of a “science of subject”;⁸⁵ I want to take the time here to outline that how I have come to understand this problem, is one in relation to what happens “between Kant and Hegel” in the history of modern philosophy.⁸⁶ If we were to summarise what is happening in this transition on the deepest level, we can say that Kant is “responding” to the externalisation of consistent systems (from Plato’s Idea-space, to Aristotle’s matrix of causation, to Spinoza’s Nature-God, etc.) and towards the possibility of subjective freedom within the deterministic chain of causation itself (his “Critique of Pure Reason”). The problem in Kant’s project, for Hegel, is not the way he is framing his own work as a radical break from the externally consistent systems that have come to constitute classical and modern philosophy, but rather the way in which Kant himself simply “shifts the problem around” from an external problem to an internal problem (in the context of Rose: the problem of internally consistent systems). In other words, Kant critiques the pure reason of externally consistent systems, but merely displaces these externally consistent systems into an internally consistent system (the transcendental schematism, a priori categories of the understanding, etc.).⁸⁷ What Hegel achieves is simply a reflection that it is not enough to move from externally consistent to internally consistent systems: one must move from internally consistent systems to, in Rose’s language: the situation of the now.

This reason why Rose’s work references Systems and Subjects at this key juncture, is because this transition informs the foundations of Systems and Subjects as a work working from the presuppositions of the “Hegelian absolute” as “substance (system) but also subject”:⁸⁸

“The Kantian transition was mostly a response to “naive” Newtonian presuppositions of external objective reality, which was an idea inherited from ancient Aristotelian physics and logic concerned with constructing a general or universal picture of being. […] The Hegelian transition was mostly in response to “naive” Kantian presuppositions of an a priori synthetic imagination as transcendental and ahistorical, as opposed to phenomenal and historical products of logical becoming. In other words, if Kant presupposed that space and time were in some sense eternal intuitive categories of the understanding requires to do the work of mathematical abstraction, Hegel presupposed that even these categories must be explained within the context of a historical genesis with the possibility to become other.”

This challenge directly interfaces with the challenge posed to us by Rose’s “Map-Consistency” insofar as not only classical mathematics but classical philosophy and classical physics is based on a consistent map that arguably attempts to close around the real (instituting external prediction), as opposed to recognising the real as situation (and cultivating subjective preparedness). While in the transition from classical to modern philosophy we increasingly find the problem of freedom front and center; in the transition from classical to modern physics (or quantum physics), we find the transition from space and time as external categories to the real of indeterminacy and uncertainty (that nature does not know itself, i.e. its identity is in a radical flux of superpositions). Here modern philosophy and physics potentially coincide in the challenge of “freedom” in the “becoming other” of reality itself.

The real difficulty of this challenge is one that we find at the core of Kant’s categorical imperative, which if anything, is an axiom striving for “Map-Consistency” i.e. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. However, what the philosophy of freedom and the physics of indeterminacy seem to point us towards is that every universal law is actually radically singular, grounded as a constitutive exception (in the case of the classical ideas, we have the irreducibility of self-reference; and in the case of classical physics, we have the irreducibility of the quantum). Thus, Kant’s law, while shifting the terrain of classical physics from an externality to an internality, is at the same time a new “impossibility”: we cannot act in accordance to a will that should become universal law if every universal law is riddled by the antagonism of an exception to that universal law. What we can do is act in accordance to a will that should become universal law only if that universal law includes within itself its own capacity for fundamental dissolution and reformulation.

To state this in Christian Atheist terms: the universal law must itself be capable of dying and being reborn in the singularity of universality itself. Hegel thought of this dimension as the dimension of love, as the most monstrous contradiction of universal law; and also what Christ supposedly was sent to fulfill internal to the universal law of Judaism itself.

But let’s frame the importance of “Map Consistency” in a more relatable way: in the situation of the role of a Father as the universal law. From the perspective of a child, of course we not only want, but need a Father that is consistent. Our Father should act in such a way that we can predict what our Father is going to do, or that our Father is socially intelligible to us. If we live in a house where our Father is socially un-intelligible, inconsistent, we will quickly find ourselves in a type of nightmare that reveals a reality to us that we are actually not prepared or equipped to face. The “Map Consistency” of the Father is crucial for a healthy development, and gives us the sense that reality is something we can trust, hold on to, find support in, and even love. However, and at the same time, we do not want a Father whose “Map Consistency” is so rigid and absolute that there is no room for us to develop our own “Map Consistency” (potentially a “shock and surprise”). In this context, the Father needs to be both consistent with an exception, i.e. to know when to be consistent as the universal law, and when to make room for an exception (the Son), to start to carve out his or her own pathway. Thus, the problem of the traditional Father is that they are all-too-often “transcendental” reifications of an “absolute consistency”; and the problem with the post-modern Father is that they are all-too-often “absent” or reifications of a “Dead Father” that you didn’t even know before they died. The ideal here is for the Father to function as if transcendental in our youth, and as if dead as we become our own (and in that process we redefine our relationship to our Father, what our Father was, and also what our Father is).

The same principle can be extended metaphorically to the fields of religion, physics, philosophy, and maths: we need a “Fatherly” “Map Consistency” in our youth, both as individuals and apparently as a species; but we also need the Father to make room for the exception, both for us as individual Sons, and as a collective species Son, in order to find out how we may become-other in a new time and context. Rose understands this transition as the transition from the “Age of Givens” (Map Consistency) to the “Age of Maps” (Map Situating).⁸⁹ The challenge of this transition is that we lose the consistency of a singular world, in which we can enjoy the privilege of not-thinking (arguably “traditional man”), and we are confronted with the dizzying complexity of a pluralistic world in which our very relation to how we might construct a consistent map is itself thrown into a situational whirlwind:⁹⁰

““Age of Givens” to “Age of Maps”: After “the loss of givens” with Globalisation and Pluralism, thinking and rationality find themselves unable to maintain “thoughtlessness” and so must consider and explore the internal consistency of themselves and their beliefs. This is perhaps “ideological acceleration”, but it is also making “vivid” to people the fact that all beliefs and ideologies cannot be verified (that Gödel is right). As a result, this gives people a way to make their maps indestructible, as well as give them permission to create and explore new systems of internal consistency, leading to an explosion of Pandora’s Rationality (as unleashed by the internet).”

The challenge of “Map-Situating” has been present throughout his section, but it is now before us: once it is becomes impossible to believe in an internally consistent system, our very “Map Nature” as expressed temporally, we struggle to develop any consistency whatsoever, and perhaps find ourselves in a post-human abyss.

(5) Map Situating

Rose outlines the problem in-between the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps” in relation to the central philosophical challenge, and seemingly the central philosophical axiom, of their work: the true is not the rational. This split between truth and rationality runs throughout both their work as a whole, but also specifically this book series, The True Isn’t The Rational. For Rose, we can understand the difference between rationality and truth on the following grounds:⁹¹

““To be rational” is to follow the logic of given premises to their “coherent” end, but not all premises are true.”

On the other hand:⁹²

““To be true” is to believe in true and “corresponding” premises, whether rational or not.”

Are these presuppositions true?

As mentioned, Rose links rationality to “coherence” and truth to “correspondence”:⁹³

“Being true and being rational are distinct, as are correspondence and coherence.”

In order to be both rational and true one’s “coherence” must be linked by “correspondence” (which, as covered, requires a certain internal consistency). Thus, to be “rational” but “not true”, would involve being “internally coherence” without “externally corresponding”:⁹⁴

“We can spend our whole lives rational and coherent and yet still live a falsity.”

On the other hand, to be true but not rational would be to “correspond” without any “internal coherence”. We might propose the following triadic coordinates for the capacity for “Map-Situating” as “rational-truth”:

• “Rational but Not True” = Ideology (coherence does not correspond)

• “True but not Rational” = Madness (corresponds but does not cohere)

• “Rational Truth” = Absolute Knowing (coherence-corresponds)

This triad of Ideology-Madness-Absolute Knowing then points us to the problem in-between the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps”:

• The Age of Givens is one dominated by Ideology in that coherence is privileged over correspondence (“thinking and rationality maintain thoughtlessness”)

• The Age of Maps is one dominated by Madness in that people correspond but do not cohere (“all beliefs and ideologies cannot be verified”)

What Rose seems to be searching for, and this is again an aim found throughout this work, is an “Age of Absolute Knowing” where rationality and truth “cohere-correspond” with each other on the basis of a qualitative change in subjective disposition, which lifts the “Age of Givens” into the “Age of Maps” without losing the benefits of both (coherence and correspondence), and while cancelling the downsides of both (ideology and madness).

In order to “stress test” this historical method let us consider how it is situated in relationship to Hegel’s treatment of “The Idea” and the “Truth” in the Science of Logic (where we want to be looking to Volume Two The Science of Subjective Logic or The Doctrine of the Concept). Here Hegel tells us:⁹⁵

“For what subject matter is there for cognition more sublime than truth itself?”

Before expanding on this most sublime subject matter, Hegel precedes to hystericise his readers, by first asking us “What is truth?”, and then secondly reminding us that the goal of discovering truth had been given up long ago:⁹⁶

“The goal of discovering the truth is, as everyone knows, something that has been given up, long since set aside with a shrug; that the unattainableness of truth is recognised also by philosophers and professional logicians.”

Here we cannot help but make connections between what Rose calls the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps”, for the Science of Logic must be situated in-between these ages, and contains within its pages (as for all Hegel’s writings) the key to the “Age of Absolute Knowing”. Hegel is suggesting that what Rose calls the “Age of Givens” (what Hegel would refer to as classical philosophy or pre-modern ancient philosophy), was not concerned with truth, but rather with rational coherence. Here Hegel might claim that pre-modern/ancient philosophers and “professional logicians” (following in the systematic footsteps of Aristotle), were more concerned with their conceptual systems then they were with the world (perhaps they vanished into their maps as is-ness). However, if Hegel was in-between the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps” (and his Science of Logic provide something to prepare us to raise the “Age of Givens” into the “Age of Maps” via “Absolute Knowing” in the “Absolute Idea”), then we find here hope:⁹⁷

“Philosophy can well hope that it will no longer occur as so strange if it […] once more begins to reassert its goal in its immediate domain, and that, after having lapsed into the ways of other sciences in renouncing truth, once more strives to rise up to that goal.”

He tells us that, to achieve such a goal, it would require our “undistracted and undivided exertion”.⁹⁸ One may suspect that this commitment to truth is on the level of (1) being awake to the risk of falling into a coherence that does not correspond to the situation (requiring our vigilance); and (2) being awake to the risk of madness in corresponding to the situation without good reason (requiring our vigilance).

The whole historical struggle with humanity and the truth seems to involve the fact that our very starting condition presupposes us to be antagonistic with truth, and even may bring us to the ironic tragedy that our very being is poorly designed to know the truth. Hegel outlines the struggle in the following way:⁹⁹

“The truth is that it is not the material given by intuition and representation which must be validated as the real in contrast to the concept.”

Here we find ourselves in a situation where the way our cognition is predisposed to measure truth, that is by intuition and representation, is not truth; and what our cognition is predisposed to be unable to even think with, the concept, is, if not truth, a precondition for it (“The Absolute Idea”). Hegel outlines this explicitly as a problem with the being of our starting condition:¹⁰⁰

“The prevailing fundamental misunderstanding is that the natural principle, or the starting point in the natural development or the history of an individual in the process of self-formation, is regarded as the truth and conceptually the first.”

Hegel notes that it is no doubt true that intuition and representation are naturally first, but this natural first does not allow us to yet enter the knowing of truth. This is the whole point of why Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit before the Science of Logic, so as to condition cognition to be able to entertain the truth at all. It is through the “phenomenological journal” (governed by our starting condition, and the immanent failures of our intuitions and representations), that “the order of nature” become “sublated” in “the concept”.¹⁰¹ This is not the “end” of the story (“Hegel as conceptual monster sublating nature”), but rather the beginning of the story: the beginning of rational cognition being able to actually think truth:¹⁰²

“what is true in what happens, in order further to comprehend on the basis of this truth what in the narrative appears as a mere happening.”

The straw-man interpretation of Hegel would be to take the “sublated concept” as evidence that he is equating “rationality with truth”, or “rationality is truth”, as opposed to Rose’s “the true is not the rational”. But that would be again mistaking Hegel’s monstrous efforts to raise cognition towards the capacity for truth. Here Hegel states explicitly his definition of truth:¹⁰³

“The objectivity of thought is here, therefore, specifically defined: it is an identity of concept and thing which is the truth.”

In other words, for Hegel, we must first be capable of the concept (working through the phenomenal negativities of intuition and representation) before we can then be the types of knowers capable of truth. In Rose’s terms: the “Age of Givens” is the “phenomenological ladder” where we do not know truth but are building up via ideology the capacity to know truth; and the “Age of Maps” is the failure to cultivate the standpoint from which people can know truth and instead just throwing people directly into the monstrosity of the truth itself (which will and has led to madness).

In short: “concept without reality” is “Age of Givens” (Ideology); but “reality without concept” is “Age of Maps” (Madness); but the “concept and reality” is the “Age of Absolute Knowing”:¹⁰⁴

“Since the idea is the unity of the concept and reality, being has attained the significance of truth; it now is, therefore, only what the idea is.”

The key here is that the “concept without reality” is getting lost in “intuitions and representations” (ideology); and the “reality without concept” is getting lost in “the real without truth” (madness); but “unity of concept and reality” is raising intuitions and representations to conceptual thought of the real situation that can be met with a truthful idea. On this level, we find the following immortal words on the nature of the Absolute Idea (as unity of concept and reality) as “Rational-Truth” (coherence-correspondence):¹⁰⁵

“All the rest is error, confusion, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, and transitoriness; the absolute idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth.”

The stakes here is that the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps”, from the point of view of the Absolute Idea as “all truth” is nothing but “error, confusion, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, transitoriness”; but that the “Age of Absolute Knowing”, will be “being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth”. Moreover, Hegel’s Science of Logic proposes to us a method (of the subject), if we have ears to hear and eyes to see, to be worthy of the Absolute Idea:¹⁰⁶

“nothing is conceived and known in its truth unless completely subjugated to the method; it is the method proper to each and every fact because its activity is the concept.”

This method involves the opposite of both ideology and madness: it involves negative self-reference (negative in relation to the starting condition of our being: intuition and representation). He suggests that negative self-reference is the “turning point” of the “movement of the concept” and is the “innermost source of all activity, of living and spiritual self-movement”.¹⁰⁷ He continues regarding negative self-reference:¹⁰⁸

“it is the dialectical soul which everything true possesses and through which alone it is true; for not his subjectivity alone rests the sublation of the opposition between concept and reality, and the unity which is truth.”

Here the precise method of negative self-reference is to view the result of our action as the truth (the truth is mediated), but the result of our action is not something we can know at the beginning (in its immediacy). Thus, we must be the types of beings that can unified the immediacy of untruth, and in a faithful, patient, and careful mediation, be open to what is the truth (without knowing in advance, and without a guarantee that it is something that will serve what we think we desire):¹⁰⁹

“This result is therefore the truth. It is just as much immediacy as mediation, or that it is the unity of the two, […] for it is not a dormant third but, exactly like this unity, self-mediating movement and activity.”

The beginning is an indeterminate starting condition without truth; the end becomes a determinate final condition with truth. But the ultimate mistake that can be made in applying this method, is once using it, forgetting it, or even denouncing it as a whole, that is, as including within itself a relation to the false, and also recognising that the determinate final condition just as much opens to the indeterminate starting condition as the other way around (it is a “circle of circles”). From Hegel:¹¹⁰

“Now since this determinateness is the proximate truth of the indeterminate beginning, it denounces the incompleteness of the latter, and it also denounces the method itself which, starting from that beginning, was only formal.”

In other words, it is wrong to view this method as a “linear development into the Absolute Idea”; as a method that “once I get there”, “I can discard of it”, for the “work is done”. For Hegel: the work is never done, and once you get there you can just as easily be gone again, and if you discard the thing that helped you get there you will fall further than if you had never used the thing to get there in the beginning. In other words:¹¹¹

“The method of truth also knows that the beginning is incomplete, because it is a beginning; but at the same time it knows that this incompleteness is necessary, because truth is but the coming-to-oneself through the negativity of immediacy.”

Hegel notes here that there is a challenge before us, in terms of entering an “Age of Absolute Knowing”, insofar as the subject’s constituting the historical process itself are unfaithful and impatient, and we can call this unfaithfulness and impatience a product of both pictorial and representational thinking that is wedded to the sensuous impressions of our intuitive faculties, as well as unable to bare the unknowing of the final result:¹¹²

“To meet the subjective need and the impatience that come with not knowing, one may well provide an overview of the whole in advance — by means of a division for reflection that, in the manner of finite cognition, gives the particular of the universal as already there, to be waited for as the science progresses. Yet this affords nothing more than a picture for representation; for the true transition from the universal to the particular and to the whole which is determined in and for itself and in which that first universal is in truth itself again a moment — this transition is alien to the division of reflection and is the exclusive mediation of science itself.”

To conclude this extended analysis of Hegel’s understanding of truth in the Science of Logic, we offer a final reflection on the nature of the circle of circles as the key to “singular-universality” and distinct from the traditional world/classical philosophy characterised in the “Age of Givens” (where we find a “perfect sphere”), and also as distinct from the postmodern world/philosophy characterised in the “Age of Maps” (where we find “lines of flight”):¹¹³

“By virtue of the nature of the method just indicated, the science presents itself as a circle that winds around itself, where the mediation winds the end back to the beginning which is the simple ground; the circle is thus a circle of circles, for each single member ensouled by the method is reflected into itself so that, in returning to the beginning it is at the same time the beginning of a new member.”

My claim in relying on Hegel for the foundation of Philosophy Portal is basically to lay a groundwork that can avoid a regression back, in Rose’s terms, to the “Age of Givens” (perfect spheres), and also to rise above the “Age of Maps” (lines of flight), in the cultivation of subjective capacity to inhabit or become ensouled by the method that is the circle of circles, and perhaps in that context, plant the seeds for an “Age of Absolute Knowing”. It is to just important but essential that we understand this because, it is not only that going back to an “Age of Givens” is wrong, it is in fact impossible. What happens when people strive to go back to an “Age of Givens” is that, in fact, one has fallen into the problem of the “indestructible map”, and will find oneself in the problems we set ourselves towards the end of this article: “Map Totalising” and “Map Proliferation”.

But let’s, again, not get ahead of ourselves.

For Rose, all of this discussion of the distinction between the rational and the true is involved in the challenge of being the types of subject’s who can “Map Situate”. They start with the basic presupposition that the rational is not the true, and the true is not the rational, and they work this antagonism up to the possibility of a “rational truth”. One can here situate the work of Rose in “Hegel’s hope” that future subjectivity could rise up to the goal of truth without falling back into a rational coherence without the capacity to care about truth (“Age of Givens”); or without corresponding to madness and in a sense become destroyed by truth (“Age of Maps”). For Rose, being both “rational and true” also requires a type of vigilance and subjective attitude that can withstand the unpredictable appearance of their seeming incommensurability, at least from the perspective of one not “ensouled” by the “method”:¹¹⁴

““True” and “rational” are distinct, though they often cross like rivers that join and become indistinguishable before parting and going their own separate ways again.”

While becoming “ensouled” by the “method” does not guarantee that reason and truth constantly overlap, one is reflexive of the gap/difference between the two, and can perhaps become more artful or skilled in relating to the gap/difference as such:¹¹⁵

“When the rivers are joined, there is little difference between “being rational” and “being true”, but when they are apart, we can tell there is a difference.”

On the side of the “Age of Givens” and the “Ideological Coherence”, Rose notes that rationality can never take you all the way, that rationality can take you a far distance, but only so far as that you must take a “leap” (again the key: faithfulness, patience). In this “leap” there is always the risk of “madness”, and a “truth” that is “too much to bear” or that one is “not ready for”. In this “leap” one can “fall off the cliff” and into “deep waters” where one is “lost forever” and “never found”. There is a reason why the philosophers and logicians of the traditional world “set aside” the problem of truth “with a shrug”. Moreover, the philosophers and logicians of the traditional world could never “do it for you” or “do it for us”, the real challenge of the modern world, or the “Age of Maps”, is that only you can do it (take the leap, swim in those deep waters):¹¹⁶

“Ultimately, rationality itself can never “leap” to the true: rationality can only bring “you” to where “you” can “leap”. And each of us “leaps” with our truths about life: “you” can only be “you”.”

If we do not live up to this challenge, if we do not take the leap, and risk madness; or if we decide to stay in madness, and dare not think what it is that we are or think where we are, then we can easily find ourselves in a situation, or indeed do find ourselves in a situation where:¹¹⁷

“fools defend the truth, and geniuses defend lies.”

A world where “fools defend the truth” is the “Age of Maps” (Madness); and a world where “geniuses defend lies” is the “Age of Givens” (Ideology). In order to work with the double problem of the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps” to the “Age of Absolute Knowing” we would need a world where “geniuses defend the truth” and “fools defend lies” in such a way that fools are seen as moments of the truth on its lower level, and geniuses are doing the work of making sure the fools are traversing the ideology or madness of their own phenomenological journey. What is more, we would need a world where the “geniuses defending truth” are “situated” in relation to key dimensions of power and influence, but that is a whole different challenge.

For Rose, they have their own way of conceptualising this as a “circle of circles”, but what they call “wheels within wheels”:¹¹⁸

“An individual “being true” can be situated in a national “being true” and so on. And the larger “being true” will influence the formation of the individual “being true”, all oriented and justified by (a) “being rational(s)” along the way… Wheels within wheels within wheels…”

Now our “wheels are stuck”, and the relation between “the individual” and “the universal” is fragmented; at moments it seems beyond repair. The politics of our moment is drifting more and more towards a non-democratic result, a looming threat of a “totalising madness”. Without cultivating the skill of “Map Situating” at the intersection of the “rational truth”, surely that is where we will tend. Here Rose brings us to the problem of “Map Totalising”:¹¹⁹

“So, are we stuck? If we don’t “think thinking anew”, easily. What are the consequences of a failure to rethink thinking? “Totalisation”.”

What is important to note at this juncture of the article is that we have moved from our spontaneous dialectic, “Map Natures-Sealing-Vanishing”; and we have approached the problems outlined at the beginning of modern philosophy, “Map Consistency” and “Map Situating”. But here we reach the moment where we must admit to ourselves: we have failed the modern project. In the failure of the modern project, arguably as cultivating a “Map Consistency” (movement from space to time) and towards “Map Situating” (absolute knowing in the real); we find ourselves stuck with the problem of “Map Totalising” which will again break into the problem of “Map Proliferating”. Throughout the rest of this article, there will be an attempt to both confront this challenge, as well as engage what Kant did not: a critique of desire (as opposed to reason), in order to raise our drive to the problem of real situations.

(6) Map Totalising

We can say here that “Map Totalising” is related to the problem outlined by Hegel in his method of truth insofar as the subject of “Map Totalisation” is replacing the hard work of the method of truth with a pictorial representation of truth. What is lost in this move from the method of truth to the pictorial representation of truth, is the incorporation of the “non-rational” dimension of the truth into the process of rationality for truth itself. Here Rose relies on French poet and critic Benjamin Fondane, who he calls a figure of the “Modern Counter-Enlightenment” (along with Hegel and others). With Fondane, Rose develops this thesis that “Map Totalisation” is a result of “ordinary consciousness” and its “linear cognition” towards “wholeness” “completeness” and “totality” that does not include within itself “self-relating negativity” as the crucial turning point of the entire methodical movement:¹²⁰

“Fondane understood that we are beings who can’t be understood linearly. If we try, we commit the mistake of seeking “wholeness” and totality, which leads to self-effacement — problematic “death drive”.”

This problem can and must be situated in relation to a “theopolitical” analysis of 20th century politics, especially as it relates to communism and fascism; but also in analysis of 21st century “capitalist individualism” which is a potentially even more dangerous form of “collectivist totalitarianism”. As situated into the problem of seeking wholeness and totality, the communist can seek wholeness and totality in the state of World Communism for species-being (placing it as an end which justifies any means); or the fascist can seek wholeness and totality in the Socialist State for a particular ethnic group (placing it as an end which justifies any means). But also “capitalist individualism” eradicates the “non-commodified” “family-community-state” as an ethical system, and leaves us with “individuals and the market” where “wholeness” in the form of “acquiring commodities we desire” is itself “totality” (opening up the necessity of a “critique of pure desire”). In this situation the “end which justifies any means” (and thus suspends the real of ethics), is the pursuit of profit, capital accumulation, insofar as the logic of capital gives us the surest path to self-organise our activity. Here Rose uses Fondane to reflect both the realities of 20th century totalitarianism, but also points towards a warning of how this same motion can appear to us today as individuals.¹²¹

The problem as outlined by Rose, is situated clearly in the “Age of Maps”, where the problem is not only “rationality” but also “non-rationality”. The “Age of Givens” is governed by “rational coherence of maps” and the question is whether these maps have any correspondence at all; but the “Age of Maps” is governed by the “non-rational correspondence of maps” and the question falls back on the subject and whether or not the subject is capable of the real of the world (its situations, e.g. “Global Pluralism”). When this latter dimension becomes dominant we are led into “totalitarianism” or “insanity” or “totalitarianism as insanity”.¹²² Indeed, if we are willing to look into the details of the actual situations that emerged in communist states or fascist states, or indeed, even if we take a look at our actual situations in “capitalist individualism”, it is hard not to find ourselves looking directly into the “heart of madness”. Rose links this situation with the “loss of givens”, but also reminds us that this “loss of givens”, is not only equal to the “totalitarian state” (either communist, fascist, or capitalist), but also the “loss of metaphysics”:¹²³

“It is not by chance that the rise of totalitarianism and the Modern State has corresponded with the loss of metaphysics.”

We could say something like we “lost metaphysics” in the “Age of Givens” but were not yet ready for the subjective challenge that would be required to “actively create metaphysics” in the “Age of Maps”.¹²⁴ One cannot just live on “bread alone”, and indeed one cannot live on “science and pragmatism alone”: metaphysics is the queen of the sciences; it both “does not exist” and yet “insists”. This “insistence” arguably is what calls us towards the challenge of “creation”.¹²⁵ If we do not create, then the madness of living in a world without metaphysics or givens will give way to “totalitarianism as insanity”. In other words, if we do not create, itself only possible as “singular universality”, then we fall into the “totalitarian collectivism” of “our race/ethnicity”, or “our communist species-being”, or even “our consumer identity”. Here “race/ethnicity” is the fascist way of replacing religion; “communist species-being” is the communist way of replacing religion; and “consumer identity” is the capitalist way of replacing religion. What all of these forms avoid is the struggle of creativity, precisely because identification with religion, race/ethnicity, species-being, or consumer identity is not the real struggle that creativity is (either biologically or culturally).

Here I want to situate Rose’s dialectic of rational/non-rational as a struggle that involves creativity, and a struggle that is necessary to become a “rational-true being”, that is a being whose coherence-correspondence are brought into a repetitive and always fragile/precarious alignment. We can say that the problems of “Map Totalisation” are problems that arise in symptoms of “Map Proliferation” because they not only fail to live up to a modern understanding of causation (reason), but because they fail to understand the nature of creation/creativity (truth). A simple premise: to create is non-rational because to create is in the freedom/gaps of the rational chain. By definition: if creation was rational it would not exist but would already be incorporated as part of existence. By definition: to create requires being rational in relation to non-rationality, that is in relation to what does not yet exist. Here I want to situate these claims in relation to a speculative metaphysical hypothesis that Rose forwards:¹²⁶

“Creativity more than anything else is reminiscent of man’s vocation before the Fall”

I would say that here we should consider the idea that what man fall’s from is something that not only “does not exist” but “never existed” (perfect Garden, subject as non-alienated creative species-being); we should see this space as radically co-extensive with the “reflective experience that we have lost something” while at the sometime “reflecting that this experience that we have lost something points towards the future-present and not the past”. My point is that the “Age of Givens” was precisely a protection from the real, a safety net from madness, an ideological blanket where we could “incubate” our species-being; but the “Age of Maps” requires that we recognise our fallenness directly and assume responsibility for it in becoming creative beings (in relation to the non-rational). If we do not assume this responsibility we fall into the creation of totalitarian states that take various shapes and forms (communist, fascist, capitalist). We cannot reclaim our lost object in religion (the one true religion), race/ethnicity (the original master race), species-being (primitive communism), nor commodities (the true object-cause of desire); but can only reclaim our lost object in suspending our “fallen nature” and creating what we feel was lost but never existed.

In this precise sense “Map Totalisation” gives us a “distorted window” into what we think we want but are not yet subjectively ready for. “Map Totalisation” is like what we think we want but in the form of the pure madness of desire. The only rational response to the pure madness of desire is the critique of desire itself so that we can bring ourselves to the locus of the creative drive. If we do not engage such a critique, the practical results of what we have seen in communist, fascist, and capitalist “Map Totalisation” is a strange mixture of boredom and violence:¹²⁷

“Without non-rationality we are “practically determined” to end up in a world of boredom and/or a world of violence.”

Yes, the communist and fascist states were violent; they were also boring. Yes, the capitalist states are violent; they are also boring. Moreover, perhaps creativity is a mix of violence turned inwards and made productive instead of destructive?; perhaps creativity is a mix of boredom turned into incessant activity and motion? What is it like to actually just sit with yourself doing nothing? It is not only because it is impossible, but because it also brings one to one’s true motivation in feeling the core of the Freudian unconscious spring up: incest, cannibalism, and the lust for killing. One should not take this hyper literally: incest represents the most intimate sexual fantasies for union with the Other (placenta, breast); cannibalism represents the most intimate oral drive/feast for abundance at the heart of the Other; and lust for killing represents the most intimate terror of the all-powerful non-lacking Other who will deprive me of my ultimate sexual union and oral feast unless I end him first. We not only see pragmatic defences against these unconscious realities in metaphysical structures like Christianity:

• Universal Church = Incestuous Other

• Eucharist = Ultimate Feast

• Crucifixion = Sacrificing Oneself (inwardising violence)

But we also find that the communist, fascist, and capitalist states as “Map Totalising” failed and have failed to sublimate these drives into something more creative than the structures we find under the “Age of Givens”. In communism we find our violence unleashed in communist state terror, the gulags; in fascism we find our violence unleashed in industrial factories designed to purify the race/state (holocaust); and in capitalism we find our violence unleashed in endless and arguably mindless productivity, with no capacity to turn the excess wealth and abundance of our productivity into actual creative freedom. In his situation we drown in our own excess.

No wonder we have a “surprising rebirth of Christianity”: people are looking to return to an “Age of Givens” where we do not need to “create metaphysics” but can merely use it once more as a defence against the most intimate and disturbing aspects of our own drives. Here we find Rose pointing us towards the direction of the failures of communism, fascism, and contemporary capitalism, as they exist in the “Age of Maps” and thus the dominance of madness over ideology:¹²⁸

““Non-rationality” isn’t absurd at all, but a reflection of truth (“the territory” which cannot be totally “mapped”, per se, if at all).”

What communists, fascists, and capitalist states have in common is not only a release into the madness of what is (our species-being, our racial/ethnic groups, or pure industrial production), but also the belief that these things can be “captured” by our “Map Totalising”. In other words, what communists, fascists and capitalist states all share is the release into non-rationality without the capacity to create in the non-rationality. The capacity to create with the non-rational, and in the process becoming beings capable of “rational-truth”, is the only way to avoid “Map Totalisation” since you cannot both create and be a “Map Totalised” being:¹²⁹

“The “non-rational” is critical for […] stopping totalitarianism.”

The situation of “Map Totalisation” is tragic. But Rose tells us that is the very condition for real philosophy to emerge:¹³⁰

“True philosophy is tragic philosophy.”

Here we should recall that Hegel’s “method for truth” involved us going against our “Map Nature”, opening us to a pathway that involves faith and patience, as well as enduring “error, confusion, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, transitoriness”. We can say that while the “Age of Givens” was this enduring, the “Age of Maps” presents us with it in a different form: in the end communism, fascism, and even capitalism may be nothing but “error, confusion, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, transitoriness”. In the end, none of these paths offered us “being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth.” Here Rose tells us that is why we now require “thinking in ways which will seem unnatural and wrong.”¹³¹

The only alternative is “Map Totalisation” that becomes “Map Proliferation”, that is a “multiplicity of totalising maps” (which is arguably already the move from 20th century communism and fascism into capitalist individualism).

(7) Map Proliferation

The world of “capitalist individualism” is a world where we are presented with an ultimate paradox: collectivism in the form of hyper individualism; or to frame it in Rose’s language: totalisation in the form of hyper “Map Proliferation”. In this section I am going to offer what I think is the central issue of the movement from “Map Totalisation” to “Map Proliferation” as situated in the aforementioned historical political tensions from 20th century communism/fascism (“Map Totalisation”) to 21st century capitalist individualism (“Map Proliferation”), where 21st century capitalist individualism can be understood as the “Peak Age of Maps” where every brilliant person has their own “Map Totalisation” (and is thus contributing to “Map Proliferation”). Rose calls this directly “collective schizophrenia” or “psychosis”:¹³²

“We are simultaneously hyper-brilliant and struggle with severe mental illness because of that hyper-brilliance. Our collective schizophrenia is practically our collective brilliance.”

But the core issue of “Map Totalisation” is that, because “totality” as “wholeness” and “completeness” is ontologically impossible, and that those in the “Age of Maps” have not yet reconciled with the fact that there is no going back to the “Age of Givens”, we instead have “Map Totalisation” striving for reconstituting an “Age of Givens”, but in reality we have “Map Totalisation” actualising the psychosis of the “Peak” “Age of Maps”:¹³³

“So “completeness is not possible as a totality, but an “(in)complete system” is possible, and that possibility is far stronger than enabling greater and more refined “map-proliferation”.”

We should recall that both “Map Totalisation” and “Map Proliferation” are to be located very precisely in the failure to “Map Situate”. You will recall that to be capable of “Map Situating” well one needs to “sublate” the “Age of Givens” (Ideology) and the “Age of Maps” (Madness); but in failing this challenge we get first “Map Totalisation” (20th century failure of politics, e.g. communism, fascism, capitalism); and second get “Map Proliferation” (e.g. psychotic society lost in hyper-individualised virtual realities; or perverted society under tyranny of instrumentalised narcissistic realities). Here Rose refers to this failure to sublate the “Age of Givens/Maps”, and the fall from “Map Totalisation” into “Map Proliferation” as “Cheap Deleuzianism”:¹³⁴

“But what is our situation, in which map-situating occurs? Our situation is that “the map isn’t the territory”, that reality is A/B yet just seems A/A so that we are not overwhelmed by “The Real” without any chance of developing ourselves better for it or handling “otherness”, which means we must be at risk of failing to realise the world is A/B. This natural mistake results in map-totalisation, but since “maps” are naturally more individualistic and atomised than “givens”, this map-totalisation doesn't readily manifest as a new global monoculture or something, but instead as a radical multiplication of different worldview options (“Cheap Deleuzianism”, we might say), which is too ay that map-totalisation leads to map-proliferation. This seems wrong, seeing as “totalisation” should mean that there isn’t a “proliferation” but a radical unity, but this makes more sense once we realise that “maps” enclose on themselves quickly and are far less able to incorporate numerous “others” like “givens” could, thanks to the advantage of “thoughtlessness”.”

We find here the “real stakes” for the “failure of “Map-Situating””. The failure of rising to the challenge of a “Hegelian Spirit Science”, on the terms of phenomenology, logic, and rights, leads to a world under a “Cheap Deleuze”. We might even say that “Map Proliferation” is the new global monoculture, but the precise nature of the darkness of this situation is often not recognised. For example, pro-natalist propagandists Malcolm and Simone Collins suggest that mainstream liberal culture dominated by “Woke Ideology” (or is it “Woke Madness”?), suggest that this is the new “global monoculture” which is parasitising the children of more rural and traditionalist cultures (which actually represent a “true diversity and inclusion”).¹³⁵ But in reality are they not also part of this “global monoculture” insofar as the actual “global monoculture” is “capitalist individualism”? In their precise situation their “creation of cultivars” (religious structures for reproduction) is yet another way to fail “Map Situating”, falling into “Map Totalisation” (their own “cultivar” or “private religion”), which in turn contributes to the psychosis/perversion (I’ll let you decide) of “Map Proliferation”.¹³⁶ What it results to is simply this:

• We use obstacle-enemy X (Woke Madness qua social-wide failure to Map-Situate) to create our own personal religion (Cultivar qua new Map Totalisation) which in turn allows us to monetise on big tech platforms via algorithmic audience capture (capitalist individualism as the new source of Map Proliferation)

The depths of the problem are far reaching and this is just the tip of the iceberg, but the coordinates extend to any form of “Map Totalisation”, whether “Left” or “Right”, it doesn’t really matter on the level of culture. In this context, culture war conflicts should be seen as symptomatic of capitalist individualism, the void of real socialist politics (re: “Death of the Millennial Left”),¹³⁷ and the appearance of “Peak” “Age of Maps” as “cynical reason” (perversion) or “absent reason” (psychosis).

The core dynamic I would like to bring to our attention here is the way that what can appear as a distributed rhizomatic structure (“Deleuzian”) is just the “other side” of the centralised technofeudal platforms (“Real Givens”).¹³⁸ In other words, what has replaced the “Age of Givens” in the “Age of Maps” are the centralised technofeudal platforms (which are certainly given to us, so given to us, that we cannot not use them). To be precise: Map Proliferation qua spread of Map Totalisations occurs under the Real of technofeudal givens. Indeed, the success of centralised technofeudal platforms is so total that it does function as a kind of “thoughtlessness”. Thus, if we were really to engage the task of “Map Situating” it would have to be done in the context of both “Map Totalisation” and “Map Proliferation” as symptoms of not only the failure to sublate, but also the absolute impotence of our own maps (re: “Age of Maps”).

Here I want to give two examples of the way in which “Map Proliferation” on both the “Far Left” and “Far Right” can manifest via “Map Totalisation” producing a “Cheap Deleuze” (appearance of a distributed rhizomatic structure), but in reality is just the other side of the regress to an “Age of Givens” qua technofeudalism. The first example, from the “Far Left”, comes in the form of “burner communities” that attempt to liberate themselves from both the nation state and technofeudal platforms via “performative excess” in “ecstatic rituals”, and attempt to rebuild “new communities” using “Web 3 technologies” (P2P, Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, etc.). The logic of these communities is explicitly Deleuzian, aiming for “rhizomatic structures” using “new technologies” that can build alternative worlds (to both the nation state and the technofeudal structures). But in reality, they remain particular and local, unable to scale due to the “tyranny of structurelessness” and the inability to reflectively metabolise “problems of scale”.¹³⁹ Moreover, not only can they not “scale” without encountering the problems of power and centralisation that already appear internal to the actual nation states and tech-platforms that have scaled; they also cannot spread because they are not “Map Situating” in relationship to the conditions of possibility of spreading (i.e. building families, intergenerational networks, local hierarchies for navigating power imbalances, sexual asymmetries, child-elder relationships, etc.). Consequently, they become yet another “Map Totalisation” under the banner of a “Cheap Deleuze”, which then contributes to the “Map Proliferation” which is actually just technofeudalism. And when they are able to do something interesting, it is because there is a multi-millionaire or billionaire who has funded it.

The second example from the “Far Right” comes in the form of “intentional white-only start-up communities”. Here we find another example of something striving for a distributed rhizomatic structure (with different intentional communities built exclusively for white people), appearing under the guise of a “Map Situation” where “global monoculture” as “liberal” and “Woke” has created an impossible condition for people of the white race/ethnicity. We can say that this interpretation of the “Map Situation” is how a “real” of “A/B” gets transformed into a “real” of “A/A” leading directly into the trap of “Map Totalisation”. What “in the real” is happening is that certain people are becoming “overwhelmed” by “The Real”, and losing the capacity to handle the level of “otherness” that it is characterised by in our current world. As a result we find yet another attempt at “self-enclosure” from the Real that will essentially fall into the trap of isolationism where enemy-obstacle conflicts appear internal to the imagined identity group self-enclosing (white people). Moreover, not only have those conflicts already appeared, between more local self-organising groups and more macro-level state-oriented groups, but both ultimately encounter deadlocks on the level of requiring funding for their initiatives from billionaires who own technofeudal platforms (e.g. at the moment they are fighting for the attention of, who else?, Elon Musk). Again, what we find is that “Cheap Deleuze” qua “Peak” “Age of Maps” is just the other side of technofeudalism as regressive “Age of Givens”.

What we want to pay attention to here is the following: distributed structures outside of a dialectic with centralised structure becomes a fake liberation underneath an invisible centralisation. Moreover, what appears as a liberation in its immediacy will inevitably become a tyranny in its mediation. Thus, we must think the dialectic of centralisation and decentralisation, and we must think the dialectic of immediacy and mediation. To actually sublate the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps” to the “Age of Absolute Knowing” we must become subjects that can stay with the reality of A/B. Whether we are dealing with “local burner communities” or “local white-nationalist communities”, they are A/A “Map Totalisations” turned “Map Proliferation” which will ultimately fall on the level of both spread and scale. What is “not thought” in these communities is the interconnected fractal web of “family-community-state”.¹⁴⁰ The burner communities too quickly identify with the surface-level of “communal similarity” but are traumatised by both their “familial history” (which is tragic, true) and “national identity” (which seems captured, true). But in their enthusiasm for community they by-pass family, and imagine a utopian state (false). In truth, it will not work. The white nationalist communities too quickly identify with “family-community” as “ethnically based”, they support this with a “cheap racialised metaphysics” but ultimately ignore the problem of the liberal state and the real of otherness. For those focused on the liberal state and the real of otherness, there will be an attempt at a larger-scale racial purification, but the likelihood of this working is very low, and almost certainly doomed to failure (or catastrophe, or both).

What both the burner-communes and the white nationalists share is a lack of patience and faith to work with the real of the drive. We should be terrified about their directionality if we are to inhabit the real of the drive ourselves. From Rose:¹⁴¹

“There is hope in a “faithful presence” of drive — but probably not before it terrifies us.”

Now that we have offered an overview of the failure to “Map Situate” in modernity, and have fallen under the problem of both “Map Totalisation” (communism, fascism), and “Map Proliferation” (capitalist individualism), we face the final term in Rose’s work: “Map Drive”. The question before us is simply this: can “Map Drive” open the critique of pure desire necessary for realising the challenge of “Map Situating”?

(8) Map Drive

The contradiction that runs throughout Rose’s The Map Is Indestructible is the looming tension between the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps”. Their work in The Map Is Indestructible focuses on the “problem of maps after the Age of Givens” in a similar way to how their Belonging Again series brings us to the “problem of givens in the Age of Maps”:¹⁴²

“The Map Is Indestructible is the second book in The True Isn’t the Rational trilogy, but it has also been released amid the publication of Belonging Again, precisely because “maps” are what we can turn to with the collapse of “givens”.”

The two series mirror each other and both point towards the necessity of their sublation in the “Age of Absolute Knowing”. Here we may know that the emphasis in their work on “intrinsic motivation” is the term that perhaps most closely links to the idea of the “drive”. However, whether “intrinsic motivation” or whether “drive”, they suggest that it is not a “given” that intrinsic motivation and drive will inherently be “good” (consider that both burner communities and white nationalists are not lacking intrinsic motivation or drive).¹⁴³

The question that runs throughout “Map Drive” seems to be related to the subjective perspective of drive itself: we are naturally in a drive that we cannot get rid of, but do we relate to this drive as something to be rid of? Or can we love this drive? Here I would claim that we can find the distinction in Rose of a “drive as something to be rid of” as the “mode of drive that is really desire”; and the “love of this drive” as the “drive in-itself” which does not need to be supplemented with a desire for a final coherence, closure, or completion in relation to the Real as such which can never be “Map Totalised” but rather must be “Map Situated” (by the drive). He outlines the stakes for thinking this distinction in the short-comings or lacks of the way the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps” have tried to reconcile with our nature:¹⁴⁴

“How “givens” and “maps” deal with drive is different: “givens” have us be motivated toward something we don’t think about, while “maps” have us be motivated toward something that which we can think about all we like.”

The problem for both the “Age of Givens” and the “Age of Maps” is that, while they “deal with drive differently”, neither “come to terms with drive”. The “Age of Givens” “doesn’t want to think about drive” (“Map Totalisation”) and the “Age of Maps” can do nothing but “let drives divide” (“Map Proliferation”). Yet and still:¹⁴⁵

“We are all under a map-drive.”

Here we must make a distinction between a “Map Drive” that is still trying to find “coherence against the Real which does not correspond” (Map Totalisation) and a “Map Drive” that has lost itself in “correspondence to the Real without coherence” (Map Proliferation). Again we can come up with a potential triad to think the stakes of both The True Is Not The Rational series (as “problem of maps after the Age of Givens”) and the Belonging Again series (as “problem of givens in the Age of Maps”):

• Return to Age of Givens = Map Totalisation in the Age of Maps (coherence agains the Real which does not correspond)

• Embrace of Age of Maps = Map Proliferation as Peak Age of Maps (correspondence to the Real without coherence)

• Age of Absolute Knowing = Map Drive as a coherence attempting repetitive correspondence with the Real

This would make sense on the level of the “drive” as “enjoying lack” in that “coherence as attempting repetitive correspondence” is something that “never really achieves its positive object” but rather must “find it again and again” (requiring subjective vigilance, attention, hard work, faith and patience). Here “The Real” is a “shifting/moving target” that can never quite be captured by the coherence of “race/ethnicity”, “species-being”, “commodity fetishism”, or some other positive object, even if all of these coherences do inform us about something meaningful in The Real. In this context Rose reminds us that we can never get rid of drive, and must always be aware that in our failure to embrace its “immortality” we produce “object-excesses” that are doomed to untruth:¹⁴⁶

“The human condition is marked by an eternal and impossible attempt to bring about some sort of resolution to this drive; a paradoxical drive to resolve drive as such. In this way, drive becomes attached to certain “objects of excess”. Conspiracies are excessive, as are “theories of everything”, vast religions, grand systems — the map is always thank to and seeking to fully articulate the territory which must exceed it, and yet this is an excess the map cannot too directly acknowledge (or risks its authority).”

What is essential here is disentangling how we think of “The Real” and “The True”. If “The Real” is what always eludes the coherence of our rationality it is like an “inner thwarting of the symbolic”, the way the “symbolic failure” informs us about what is lacking and thus what is yet needed from subjectivity (what “rational coherence” and the “Age of Givens” would not want to accept). Here I would wager that “The True” is (in Rose’s terminology) the “coherent work of correspondence” and thus, following Hegel, the rational conceptual working with reality as the becoming of reality itself. In this way, we should not equate “The Real” and “The True”, but rather say that “attention to The Real” (as what is not working for us symbolically/rationally) is the condition of possibility of “being True”. This for me would be “Map Drive”.

Here Rose reminds us that the condition of possibility for being True, in the terms of symbolic rationality not working, involves a type of faith and patience if it is not to become an enclosure:¹⁴⁷

“Our map-drive does not have to be a fate into an enclosure, but it will be if we don’t understand it and negate/sublate it into “a faithful presence”, a “clearing for beauty and Otherness.””

Rose recognises that the problems of being True here must be thought in the conditions of The Real as “Global Pluralism” (re: our symbolic rationality breaking down). They refer to “Global Pluralism” as a “great libidinal unity” (that is the total body of humanity in one web/network or “Global Brain”), which was perhaps romanticised as a unity after the end of the Cold War, but which now finds itself in impossible to resolve “commons problems” (most notably after 2001, on the level of religion; and 2008, on the level of economics). The absolute intractability of these “commons problems” led people to various self-enclosures from The Real which will in the end be unable to rise to the condition of possibility of being True:¹⁴⁸

“The map-drive has brought us to Global Pluralism, which we can associate with a great libidinal unity, and now we are suffering the struggles and challenges of marriage. The honeymoon phase (perhaps the 90s through 2008) is over, and we are finding divorce something that shouldn’t be off the table.”

The challenge before us seems clear: if we want an Age of Absolute Knowing we need a Map Drive that attempts repetitive coherence in correspondence with the Real as Global Pluralism. But that requires working with the central negativities of the Global Pluralist landscape on the level of religion and politics. On the level of religion it requires not reducing the field of religion to a symmetry between different religious positions, but also not othering the field of atheism as the condition of possibility for the mutual co-existence of different religions. On the level of politics it requires not reducing the field of capitalist politics to the “right-left” “coordinates of capital” (liberals, conservatives), but rather “conserving the human” on the level of the “problem of the logic of capital”.

For the religious side of The Real of Global Pluralism we have the risk of the desire (internal to Map Drive) to “Return to the Age of Givens” which (because it is impossible) produces new “Map Totalisations” (self-enclosures) in the form of traditional religiosity like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. which do not correspond (to actual religious plurality, but also atheism); which inevitably leads to the “Embrace of the Age of Maps” which produces an endless number of maps corresponding to the Real without coherence (which would naturally end in the “war of all against all”).

For the political side of The Real of Global Pluralism we have the risk of the desire (internal to Map Drive) to “Return to the Age of Givens” which (because it is impossible) produces new “Map Totalisations” (self-enclosures) in the form of “National Socialisms” whether White Nationalism or otherwise, which do not correspond (to actual national plurality, but also the international problem of capital); which inevitably leads to the “Embrace of the Age of Maps” which produces an endless number of maps corresponding to the Real without coherence (which would naturally end in the “war of all against all”).

Consequently, the “Age of Absolute Knowing” under the “Map Drive” as a coherence attempting repetitive correspondence with the Real would require some religious reconciliation with a “dominant religion + atheism”; and some political reconciliation with a “humanist conservatism + problem of capital”. Here the theopolitical equation related to the “dominant religion + humanist conservatism” is recognising that human beings need a stable background that functions like the best aspect of the “Age of Givens” in order to confront the Real of the “Age of Maps”. And the theopolitical equation related to “atheism + problem of capital” is recognising that the human being finds itself in a world where it must genuinely relate to other spiritual and religious orientations/positions, while also dealing with the way nations must learn to coordinate internationally to resolve “commons problems” (primarily related to capital accumulation and the collective cultivation of global values).

For me that would be an “ideal” approach to “Map Situating” from the smallest to the largest scales: that is the scales from individual subjectivity through family, community, and state; and then towards the international realm of states and the negativity of the becoming of “Global Pluralism” or “Absolute Spirit” (from the perspective of the individual subjects who are in total its collective expression). The scales from individual subjectivity through family, community, state require the equivalent of an “Age of Givens” foundation which does not avoid a stable religion, since religion can be the training grounds for higher orders of Absolute Spirit (or God). For Rose, this need for a stable religion does not necessarily need to be expressed in the permanence of a rigid identity, but rather, religion can function as an age or situation appropriate identity serving a “life of faith”:¹⁴⁹

“Faith is required for us to move from Spirit to Absolute Knowing, and Religion could train us in that faith.”

On the other hand, the scales from the international realm of states and the negativity of the becoming of “Global Pluralism” requires some multi-local “human conservation” in relation to the “containment of the logic of capital”. I would suggest that without a multi-local “human conservation” various particular forms of “human conservation” could become “problematic tribalism”, and without “containment of the logic of capital” we might say that “The Real” would become too much and end up “self-effacing” the human project as such in the sublimation of our Map Drives as the Absolute Spirit. Here is Rose’s perspective:¹⁵⁰

“We must invent, faced with this, for otherwise “The Real” will be too much (Lovecraftian). We will be self-effaced, but what are the chances that we invent something which addresses and sublimates our drives that doesn’t at the same time sacrifice social intelligibility and our capacity to be social beings? Low. Problematic tribalism is likely.”

Here taken together I would bring things back around to the ideas I developed at the beginning of this article, in relation to “Map Natures”, “Map Sealing” and “Map Vanishing” as a triad that requires a philosophical engagement on the levels of the “Abstract” (Natures vis-a-vis map-makers), the “Negative” (Sealing vis-a-vis the apocalyptic), and the “Concrete” (Vanishing vis-a-vis is-ness). To engage the “Map Drive” we need to accept our “Map Natures”: we cannot not be ideological map-makers (requiring some level of “dominant religion” and “human conservation”; we need also to reflectively engage our tendency to frame death or apocalypse as a temptation to “Map Seal”: we cannot not attempt to seal our maps into the madness of the real (requiring some recognition of an abyssal/atheistic totality dominated by the logic of capital); and we need also to disappear or “Map Vanish” into is-ness (requiring some capacity for our coherence to correspond with the Real, and thus achieve truth). The question is how reflective is this triad? Is it a triad that accepts “Map Drive” and thus cultivates the capacity to “Map Situate”? Or is it a triad that refuses the “Map Drive” and thus skips the problem of “Map Situation” for “Map Totalisation” and ultimately “Map Proliferation” into a (from my point of view unavoidable) “war of all against all”?

Here Rose closes the book offering his approach to avoid a Map Vanishing that functions as a completion into “Map Totalisation” and “Map Proliferation”, versus a Map Vanishing that function as a real drive for truthful situation:¹⁵¹

“Reality is (in)complete, and we find ourselves with a map-drive for completeness, which is fitting because reality is situational, but a drive for “completeness” is not the same as a drive for “recognising situation” (perhaps the “drive for completeness” is what in the “drive to recognise situation” we can recognise something more apophatic, whereas in “seeking completeness” that recognition seems less likely, arranging us for self-effacement.”

In this approach, not only does Rose strive to place “Map Drive” as the key for “Map Situating” (avoiding the problems of “Map Totalisation” and “Map Proliferating”), but also places “Global Pluralism” as kind of an empty “apophatic” signifier for “God” (or “Absolute Spirit”). From here we might suggest that to “truly love God” one should distance oneself from whatever self-concept or identity-concept of God one has, and instead pay attention to the “challenge of The Real of Global Pluralism” in order to see if one’s rationality can live up to the challenge of “being True”?

This is indeed how it seems Rose ends the work as a whole, bringing our focus away from our self-concepts of God and towards the reflective problem of the subject in the context of the situation of Global Pluralism:¹⁵²

“To say, “the map is indestructible”, is to say, “we need to focus on subjects.””

The work/hard road continues…

---

This article is based on the book by

O.G. Rose

The Map Is Indestructible. Pick up a copy here: The Map Is Indestructible.

The Portal will be hosting Dylan Shaul dedicated to many themes relevant to this article. To get involved this August, see: Metaphysics Resurrected.

---

1. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 6.

2. Ibid. p. 6.

3. Ibid. (“I am eating from the garbage can of ideology all the time”).

4. Ibid. p. 7.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. p. 8.

7. For the philosophical, justification for these hypotheses, my work, and the curriculum at Philosophy Portal, rests on the shoulders of the German Idealists. Here I understand the German Idealist project to be the introduction of the challenge of a self-limited reason (Kant), as well as a tarrying with that limited reason as positive contradiction (Hegel).

8. For more, see: Rose, O.G. 2025. Supplement II: Limited Reason Is More Powerful Than Unlimited Rationality. In: The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 552-559.

9. Perhaps the central cause of this creative intervention can be located in 20th century politics, from the failed attempts at communism and fascism, and a kind of reluctant acceptance of “autonomous capitalism” (Global Capital) to “handle the negativity” of the social body of humanity.

10. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 8.

11. Ibid. p. 9.

12. Ibid. p. 11.

13. Ibid. p. 7.

14. Ibid. p. 14.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid. p. 15.

17. Ibid. p. 20.

18. Ibid.

19. Here Rose will frequently reference the work of Alfred Korzybski and his Science and Sanity (1933).

20. See: Marxism as a Signifier.

21. In The Portal we hosted a month dedicated to more conservative-leaning forms of Christianity, see: Christianity in Transition.

22. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 86.

23. Ibid. p. 23.

24. Ibid. p. 25.

25. Ibid. p. 25-26.

26. Ibid. p. 43.

27. Ibid. p. 45.

28. Ibid. p. 54.

29. Ibid. p. 55.

30. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury. p. 168.

31. Goertzel, B. 2024. The Consciousness Explosion: A Mindful Human's Guide to the Coming Technological and Experiential Singularity. Humanity+ Press.

32. Last, C. 2020. Part III: Signs of a New Evolution. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 148-211.

33. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 55.

34. Ibid. p. 61.

35. Some great lines from Lacan on madness and truth of our being, see: “You will see that the question of truth conditions the phenomenon of madness in its very essence, and that by trying to avoid this question, one castrates this phenomenon of the signification by virtue of which I think I can show you that it is tied to man’s very being.”, see: Lacan, J. 2005. Presentation on Psychical Causality. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 125.

36. Žižek, S. 2011. Living in the End Times. Verso Books.

37. In one of his latest books, Surplus Enjoyment, Žižek notes that this approach is inspired by Hegel’s phenomenological dialectic: “Hegel uses the term “die verkehrte Welt” — usually translated into English as “topsy-turvy world” — to designate the madness of the social reality of his time.”, see: Žižek, S. 2022. Surplus Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed. Bloomsbury. p. 1.

38. Lawrence, M, et al. 2024. Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability, 7: e6.

39. Daniel Schmachtenberger l An introduction to the Metacrisis l Stockholm Impact/Week 2023. 2023. Norrsken Foundation. (link) (accessed: July 24 2025).

40. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury. p. 232.

41. The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: John Vervaeke Iain McGilchrist Daniel Schmachtenberger. 2023. Dr Iain McGilchrist. (link) (accessed: July 24 2025).

42. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 62.

43. Ibid. p. 72.

44. Ibid. p. 74-75.

45. Ibid. p. 81.

46. Ibid. p. 85.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid. p. 89.

49. Ibid. p. 182.

50. This is why Hegel’s philosophy of politics emphasises so strongly the subject’s capacity to reconcile with “what is” before attempting to “change everything” (i.e. to make “is-ness” correspond precisely with one’s “coherent map”).

51. Ibid. p. 100.

52. Ibid. p. 112.

53. Ibid. p. 124.

54. Ibid. p. 125.

55. Ibid. p. 138-139.

56. Ibid. p. 188.

57. Ibid. p. 194.

58. Ibid. p. 201.

59. Ibid.

60. Last, C. 2020. Preface. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. ix-xiv.

61. Behe, M. 1996. Darwin's Black Box: The biochemical challenge to evolution. Simon and Schuster.

62. Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

63. I do not want to frame this as a purely negative thing, because it is not. Many fantastic and wonderful things happened and were achieved as a result of my “Map Nature” being realised in this way (e.g. my first academic publications, my first research field trips, etc.). In fact, I would not change a thing. But it can now be used as a meta-reflexive example of how “Map Natures” work.

64. Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking.

65. Spier, F. 1996. The Structure of Big History from the Big Bang until Today. Amsterdam University Press.

66. See: Sandberg, A. 2013. An overview of models of technological singularity. The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and contemporary essays on the science, technology, and philosophy of the human future. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 376-394.

67. And so again, I do not want to frame this as a purely negative thing, because it is not. In this situation, I was tabled to work towards a doctoral thesis, which culminated in the publication of, see: Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer.

68. Last, C. 2020. Part III Signs of a New Evolution. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 150-211.

69. Last, C. 2020. Part III Signs of a New Evolution. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 214-316.

70. This was originally motivated by a conversation with anthropologist Marc Blainey and his doctoral thesis, see: Blainey, M.G. 2021. Christ Returns from the Jungle. Suny Press. We also discussed this thesis at length, see: CHRIST RETURNS... FROM THE JUNGLE! (w/ Marc Blainey). 2022. Philosophy Portal. (link) (accessed: July 24 2025).

71. Last, C., Orosz, K., Dick, D. 2020. Sex, Masculinity, God: The Trialogues. Ouroboros Publishing.

72. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 202.

73. Ibid. p. 204.

74. Ibid. p. 213.

75. Ibid. p. 206.

76. Ibid. p. 205.

77. Ibid. p. 235.

78. Ibid. p. 207.

79. Ibid. p. 213.

80. Ibid. p. 218.

81. Ibid. p. 219.

82. Ibid. p. 222.

83. Ibid. p. 227.

84. Ibid. p. 242.

85. Ibid. p. 235.

86. See: Henrich, D. 2008. Between Kant and Hegel: lectures on German idealism. Harvard University Press.

87. Last, C. 2024. Introduction: The Logic. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular-Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 37.

88. Last, C. 2023. 1.0(b) — Modern Philosophy and the Evolutionary Absolute. In: Systems and Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science and Philosophy. Philosophy Portal Books.

89. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 295.

90. Ibid.

91. Ibid. p. 299.

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid. p. 316.

94. Ibid. p. 316-317.

95. Hegel, G.W.F. 2010. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 507.

96. Ibid. p. 507-508.

97. Ibid. p. 508.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid. p. 518.

100. Ibid. p. 519.

101. Ibid.

102. Ibid.

103. Ibid. 521.

104. Ibid. p. 672.

105. Ibid. p. 735.

106. Ibid. p. 737.

107. Ibid. p. 745.

108. Ibid.

109. Ibid. p. 747.

110. Ibid. p. 748.

111. Ibid. p. 751.

112. Ibid.

113. Ibid.

114. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 299.

115. Ibid.

116. Ibid. p. 307.

117. Ibid. p. 318.

118. Ibid. p. 319.

119. Ibid.

120. Ibid. p. 320.

121. Ibid. p. 327.

122. Ibid. p. 339.

123. Ibid. p. 341.

124. This challenge is before us in our upcoming sessions at The Portal with Dylan Shaul titled “Metaphysics Resurrected”, see: Metaphysics Resurrected.

125. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 342-343.

126. Ibid.

127. Ibid. p. 344.

128. Ibid. p. 351.

129. Ibid. p. 353.

130. Ibid. p. 352.

131. Ibid. p. 368.

132. Ibid. p. 390.

133. Ibid. p. 424-425.

134. Ibid. p. 452.

135. Collins, S. & Collins, M. 2022. The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion. Omniscion Press.

136. See: Based Camp with Malcolm and Simon Collins.

137. Cutrone, C. 2023. The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006-2022. Sublation Press.

138. Varoufakis, Y. 2023. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Penguin.

139. See: Rose, O.G. 2024. The Problem of Scale (Part I). In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose.

140. See: Critique of the Critique of the Philosophy of Right.

141. Rose, O.G. 2025. The Map Is Indestructible: Problems of Internally Consistent Systems. O.G. Rose. p. 410.

142. Ibid. p. 458.

143. Ibid. p. 414.

144. Ibid.

145. Ibid. p. 428.

146. Ibid.

147. Ibid. p. 431.

148. Ibid. p. 432.

149. Ibid. p. 471.

150. Ibid. p. 455-456.

151. Ibid. p. 433-434.

152. Ibid. p. 474.