I am happy to be included in Informatics of Domination, just recently published. Each contributor's task was to comment on a pair of terms from Donna Haraway's famous informatics of domination chart from 1985. Each contributor could also opt to propose a third term. I wrote on Haraway's two terms perfection and optimization, adding a third term, absolution. Thanks to Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee for putting the volume together.
Perfection, optimization, and absolution are all terms that originate in moral and metaphysical discourse. Something may realize itself, it may be guided or adjusted, and it will eventually unloosen and dissolve. Perfection refers to something having been fully accomplished, to something in a state of completion. From a Latin root verb meaning “to make,” perfection entails a process of production. To perfect something is to intervene positively in its development, to push it in a particular direction, to craft it and finish it and make it shine. Perfection connotes maturity, development, flawlessness, purity, completion. In this sense, perfection will always have a target in its sights, the target of the ideal form. The perfect soul, or the perfect body, or the perfect society—all these things must be built and polished and pushed toward whatever ideal has been determined (the ideal soul, the ideal body, the ideal society). A metaphysical logic is particularly legible here; the developmental goal or end is the thing that most characterizes perfection, over and above the particular quality of the goal.
Similarly, optimization refers to the most favorable state. The word is derived from a root meaning “best.” Yet optimization is more sober and pragmatic than perfection. Universals matter less here; identities are not determined in absolute terms, but rather provisionally, nominally. Ignoring thorny questions about essence or purity, optimization means playing the cards as they lay, making the best use of one’s predicament, whatever it may be. If perfection is theological in spirit, always aspiring to some higher end, optimization tends to be more stubbornly secular and mundane. The best is not eternal, or essential, and certainly not given by God, even if kings and elites try to claim divine authority. Rather, the optimal is simply one arrangement among others. The optimal is the most efficient organization, the most pleasing assemblage, or the most suitable configuration.
For perfection, only one position matters, the developmental goal or end. Optimization also focuses on a single position, except now the scenario is slightly different. For optimization, what matters is the maxima (or minima) selected among a set of possible states. The highest point of a curve, or alternately the lowest point, the fastest time, or the slowest, the brightest white, the darkest black, or the grayest gray—the particular quality is unimportant, only the fact that each quality is the best, or at least best suited to the conditions at hand.
Optimization creates an aristocracy. Each thing is configured in such a way as to exploit the best arrangements of its various affordances. Indeed, Aristotle—that great thinker of the aristos—paid particular attention not to the pure idea of things but to their particular natures, whatever characterized them best. Optimizers are, in this sense, materialists at heart. They care little for what something is in its transcendental essence, but rather for how something transpires in the here and now.
Perfection plays the role of the modern term, and optimization the postmodern. As we have seen, perfection is rooted in notions of production and development—both of which are essential to the modern ethos. Likewise optimization is characteristically postmodern, as designers, curators, and engineers vie to craft ever more desirable configurations of the world. Indeed, by the late twentieth century, a vast skepticism toward perfection fell like a fog over the world. No longer would anyone dare defend things like essence or purity without risk of castigation. No more use would there be for concepts like goal or ideal. And, likewise, teleological or Platonist had become the worst epithets, used only against one’s worst enemies. Under postmodernity, the priests gave way to the engineers and the curators. Iteration became the key operation under postmodernity, with things not created so much as repeated. If under modernity bodies evolved and concepts developed, under postmodernity they were tweaked, spun, and rearranged. The goal was not so much to achieve purity of essence but to fall into the crest of an existing process, exploiting the most energy from the best spot. This is one reason why Gilles Deleuze was so enamored with surfing, among all activities. Or why, in music, the drum break took over from the old structure of verse and chorus.
Following perfection and optimization, one might attach a third term, absolution. Like perfection and optimization, absolution is borrowed from the discourse of morality and metaphysics. Absolution means to unloosen something (adjacent English terms like dissolve and solvent retain the sense of unloosening even more vividly). To call something absolute is to say that it is not bound by other things, that it is independent of all restriction. Hence the absolute is the thing that is most unrestricted or most free. For this reason, scholastic theologians used the term absolute to refer to God, and did so in a very technical sense. For, if human knowledge is limited, should there not also exist, by inverse analogy, a form of absolute knowledge that is unlimited? Or, if human bodies display limited powers, should not there also be some being with absolute power?
More specifically, absolution means to unloosen from guilt or obligation. In other words, absolution means guiltlessness. “We are not to blame!” cried the War Boys in the 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road, reprising so eloquently that general ontology of exculpation begun decades ago in Friedrich Nietzsche (“beyond good and evil”) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (“anything is possible”), if not in Lucretius too, or before him, since time immemorial. With the profanation of the world now complete, humanity is most certainly not to blame, but, again, only in a very technical sense, since no arrangement exists any more within which a term like blame would continue to have meaning. This is one reason why libertarianism, the political philosophy of unrestriction, is so dominant in the early twenty-first century, whether in Silicon Valley or in political populism, both on the left and the right. Humanity today is living through the generalized unrestriction of all things. Humanity is living through a kind of libertarianism of being, and it is not yet clear if humanity will survive it.
Yet, in an ironic twist, such a generalized climate of guiltlessness can only exist once sin becomes absolute. The only way to remove culpability completely is to make blame coterminous with existence. In the Dark Ages of the past, sin was absolute due to original sin; today sin takes other forms, whether as climate catastrophe, mass extinction, genocide, or something else entirely. Yet contemporary sin is no less absolute.
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Just like under perfection and optimization, absolution is characterized along a single axis, only now the determining factor is not a goal or optimum, but a kind of ambient grace bestowed by the godhead. Full absolution ushers in a new age of antinomianism, where human beings observe the full and complete abdication of all law and custom. In the early twenty-first century, humanity finds itself at the very antipode of Martin Heidegger’s elaboration in 1927 that the essence of the human being was Schuld, often translated simply as guilt but also meaning debt or responsibility. A world without guilt is also a world without debt. And even after the withering of a repressive and moralizing metaphysics (the perfect, the optimal), humanity has fallen into the clutches of a hyperlibertarianism of the soul (absolution), where everything is permitted and no one is guilty.
To make; to make best; to make unloose: welcome to the Second Dark Age! Not so much that old song by the Fall, I’m thinking instead of “Dark Ages” by Nomeansno:
We are living in the, in the dark ages
Haven’t seen some daylight in what seems ages
All the information is locked far beyond
Locked in circuits and bathed in silicon
Oh, the irony. Perfection and optimization always operated through a kind of logical rationality, whether in the divine cosmos or a more secular reason. Yet such guiding logics have inverted into the most impenetrable mysticism. Not since the empires of the medieval period have we seen so much dogmatic belief cover the landscape in continuous conformity. And I don’t mean heightened nationalism or a spike in religious fundamentalism. I mean Steve Jobs and Euro-bucks and petrol and Unicode—everywhere revered the world over. The symbolic order is alive and well, not despite its eradication, but precisely because it was disrupted so universally. The most pervasive power is found in the absolute suspension of power. So now the future is for penance, confession, worship, adoration. For only a total destruction of the world can depart from the total destruction of the world.