Anonymous materials

The formation of the solar system, the emergence of life on this planet, the descent of man, the determination of the structure of our unconscious through biological heredity and social evolution – itself now subject to the accelerated technological reformattings of capital ... We are the product of contingent events, material histories, webs and networks of anonymous forces.
Thus, contingency, real contingency, is, as Meillassoux says, ‘a rather menacing power’. It subtracts the historical fact of our existence from rational necessity, and introduces a new kind of precarity into our dealings with the present and the future. It reveals that we are ‘worked’ from inside and out by anonymous materials. In this respect a thinking of contingency can be understood as one of the tasks remaining if we are to have done with certain optimistic delusions of modernity. But to take this thinking as a positive task means to refuse simply being trapped in a (postmodern) state of mourning for lost certainties.

The Universal Continuum

The legacy of the Copernican Revolution – that is the revolution by and according to the open – is comprised of three components: The speculative drive of “an extreme line of thought”, the revolutionary vocation of “disturbing the peace of this world in still another way” and the true-to-the-universe logic of delivering all expressions of isolation and discreteness “remorselessly into the open.”

The universal continuum is the unbound and continuous relation of the universal to itself that is free from any intrinsic transcendental bound, absolute expression of discreteness and fundamental obstruction. All general-particular and global-regional dialectics signify the unbound and continuous relation of the universal to itself, or the universal continuum. The Copernican universe cannot be thought except within and as a universal continuum where the universal fibrates into its various modalities, general and particular instances, global and regional horizons. In this respect, since geophilosophy examines the earth as the regional horizon of thought, it must be pursued by means of a Copernican and coherent thought of the universal continuum (where the universe is understood as the interweaving of general and particular instances of the universal’s unbound relation to itself).

Reza Negarestani, Globe of Revolution - An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism, 2011.