Naming into Extinction
Thoughts on scientific language's pestiferous decadence and the true apocalypse occult
“God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.”
— Sir Francis Bacon
“With the development of technology the unconscious acquires new symbols; for example, many patients at the time when Zeppelins were in the news dreamt of airships as representations of the male sexual organ.”
—William Reich
“‘Look,’ whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
—Arthur C Clarke
When people speak of science they usually think of cold lines, calculation, sanitation—clean thoughts that exist outside of the murk and muck of ideological softness, the abjection of experiencing flesh, and the delusional mind. But the opposite has started to make itself clear. Scientific language—in its hardest, most-academic form —proliferates in strange, even occult, accumulation.
Scientific language, rising as it did at a time of baroque maximalism in European art, is not as clean as the technocrats would have us believe. Yes, funded by the slow, bone-breaking machinations of empire, modern science in the tradition of Francis Bacon, has lifted so many out of the darkness that existed in the earlier stages of civilization, that filthy place between the two utopias of Eden and Elysium. This point is hardly arguable.
But aren’t these two poles at the opposite ends of civilization themselves inventions of science? Yes, both are religious concepts as well, but hasn’t it been the purview of the anthropologist and the prophets of science fiction to illustrate what we think of pre-civilization and post-civilization, to reanimate and fill in the mythic codas of the monotheisms?
Last time I wrote about the accumulation of creative literature testing the boundaries of the reader/writer relationship by clogging the void. And the academic production of words and concepts that has been occurring—or at least accelerating since the so-called Enlightenment—is perhaps the real of this twittering decay
Since Max Weber said that scientific rationalization “disenchants”, many have claimed that science stands away and above the way that people use to see the world. This has been substantially challenged, especially by postmodern anthropologists like Talal Asad who argues that—against Jurgen Habermas’ insistence on the democratic potential of newly rational language—scientific reason and its socio-political arm, secularism, are merely extensions of the Christian worldview from which it emerged.
“In early modern Europe, the idea of ‘disinterestedness’ primarily served , together with ideas of science, nature and objectivity, to reinforce the politics and aesthetics of order,” Asad writes.
He says that regardless of claims to objectivity, rituals are conception machines that build relations and understandings of the world. The practice of science, its centrality in media and most jobs, forms and shapes human understandings in similar ways, from the day to day, as have most modes of the human being.
But this sort of science, banal and easier to understand, subject to the flows and plasticity of postmodern life, dispersed in our language, is not the same as a different kind of science, the one dominated by neologism and categorization that takes place within the university.
Science fiction has always tried to bridge this gap, bringing language from the inside of scientific study to the outside. And while much of this science has been utilitarian, it resembles occult practice and knowledge seeking for its own sake under the umbrella of progress with which science in general usually recommends itself. Think Frankenstein.
And while many remark on English as the global language of science, this is only partly true; the nomenclature of scientific naming, the aspect of science that I am most interested in, in its hardest form the so-called international scientific vocabulary, still takes Latin and Ancient Greek as its preferred vehicles.
Those who sit in the institutions and academies combine words and summon them from dead tongues to name the new inventions and the discovered aspects of the physical world.
According to the Guardian, around 5,4oo English words come into being each year, and only 1,000 of them make it into the dictionary. Far less make it into common usage. And this doesn’t count regional slang.
As Isaac Asimov remarks in his 1959 book Words of Science—written for the average reader—“It is as though scientists were protecting their mysteries from the prying eyes of ordinary mortals by an enveloping shroud of forbidding syllables.”
Asimov then goes on to say that this is not at all the case, that the non-vernacular of scientific language is in fact a bridge that crosses the gaps between vernacular and regional culture. An observation that in the 1950s probably aligned with the still-present optimism in science’s ability to change things for the better. The more nefarious sides of the eliding of the necessity of translation had not yet reached the terrifying conclusions of control, of translation the human body and soul directly into metrics that take the place of the main preoccupation of Asad’s aforementioned work.
Regardless of the intent, most scientific language is inaccessible, and Asimov’s allusion to the arcane practices, though used rhetorically, approaches the position of science as it relates to today’s society in general.
Most likely, with the anti-intellectualism and populism of the 21st century, scientists doing “hard” research will likely retreat further from the public sphere as the nomenclature continues to expand.
But science has long blended with the fantastic. Think about how much ancient mythic and fantastical creatures have depended on scientific representations of dinosaurs; the dragons in Game of Thrones look far more like Jurassic Park animatronics than they do ancient depictions; depictions of ancient races depend heavily on archaeology writing; space cultures and religion have long been intertwined through the Jedi, the world of Dune, the machine-cults of the grim-dark genres.
With the uncertainty of the Internet, cryptozoology and astrology— which take the structure of science—burst into the gaps left by the gap left by the imposition of the existence of science on the place where religion grips our minds.
As the path of civilization becomes more uncertain, the point of scientific language becomes unmoored. The production of academic language and work becomes more frivolous. Diagnostic, utilitarian language becomes decadent. Progress becomes a sick circular altar. The walls of the laboratories that have taken root in our minds, the bowls of deep space, become covered in the tattered scribblings, babbling, naming murmurs, of the potentates of scientific culture, who have now traveled far from the root, through bureaucratic nominalism, into the semi-mystic realms of scholasticism where Bruno hatched the cosmic age under which we all lay in our imaginative slumbers when we aren’t feeding the dehumanizing machine that is the born-less child of science itself.
It is said that certain sects of Kabbalists believed the true goal of religion was to realize and record all of God’s names. Science-fiction legend Arthur C Clarke’s short story “The 9 Billion Names of God” takes on a similar theme, when a high lama goes to Manhattan to seek a machine that will assist his monks in computing more quickly the names of God through a system they’ve devised, a task that will bring about the end of the world.
The high mountains of the Himalayas and New York City are positioned across from each other in the prose. The men who own and operate the machine, peddlers and cogs, think little of lama’s task, and though Clarke’s story does ultimately give the task meaning, the most interesting part is that the orders of highest science are put towards the computations of infinite naming, which the religious men never expect the scientific ones to understand. Divine naming, gloriously superfluous, surfaces and re-merges with the marching tide of the machine.
He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The high lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted them into the great volumes. No one would be saying anything. The only sound would be the incessant patter, the never-ending rainstorm of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. Three months of this, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the wall.
For almost a generation, power and science have been consolidating and the lumbering complexity of the systems on which so-called technocrats rely has already taken on a mystical tenure. AI becomes godlike or becomes the replacement for God.
This has sociological connotations and spells reckoning, but reckoning is what we swim in. But when it comes to usage and progress, the sliding of scientific naming into the realms of the religious or the occult is more of a continuation of an old trend. Names have always generated power for our species and cataloguing even without a goal in mind has shaped the lives of millions.
The machine cults rising everywhere and their infinite dirges have a different sort of sinister cadence, one that sits behind the scenes in Clarke’s story: the profits that the churning of the names turn out and spill, covering the surface of language like the plastic and waste spread from horizon to horizon in the Atacama desert.
Some recent poets have captured this and have used this churn of scientific language to create horrifying soundscapes that take the force of the accumulation, shove it into the poetic form, and bring us to the edges of meaning itself.
Will Alexander is one example. He mixes high and low language with scientific vocabulary, using a blurry array of diction that would make David Foster Wallace blush.
“I am not speaking via grammatical punctuation or the brutality of stationary conquest pattern but as electrical residue claimed as hyper-magnetic insight,” he writes in the poem “Hypersensitive Emanation,” signaling the wild chase of the poet after the waves of progress. The poems don’t so much transgress as try and trace the tendrils of language as it propels itself from the money machine.
In other poems the “meaning” becomes even harder to follow. Enshrouded in the language that fills our minds.
To claim as arcane vapour
ruination by intrigue
by kindled leprosy morays
so that I take up in my glottis
these moral hallucinogens which actively dim
which nourish themselves on behalf of active heavenly terror
as if forking my verbs with cryptography
with bird interrogation
with a haunted crystallography of deception
mentally cross-fertilized with defective aural lobotomies
so that I momentarily sing
with a cosmic catch in my wings
(“Song in Barbarous Fumarole of the Japanese Crested Ibis”)
The through lines of “simple” language and morality are caught up in the “active heavenly terror” of the paradigm. Momentary singing signals a kind of propulsion as the language of sciences mixes with that of gods, eternity eventually thrusting the work of the poet through “plagues which sustain gregarious verbal gestation” into a “geneaology of circles/beyond aphids’ scribbling/& logical strontium dialectic.”
Alexander makes the language of science speak the horror that compels it, like a demon speaking its name. He calls on righteous traditions of naming and by doing so comes to the realization that what the language is doing is beyond nature or the material dialectic. What’s left is a sort of horror, a sort of success.
This horror is taken up and driven even further towards madness by David C Porter in his work “Logopedic Formalism.”
Here, the full bounds of scientific signifiers are unleashed.
The piece begins:
“In a vacant mind in the last days crawling through semi-functional myalgic abnormalities slowly rotting with sclerosis – seminiferous tubules hemorrhaging – malignant obstructions fermenting – and infected with diffuse traumatic embryogenics.”
The language of cosmic horror, spoken at one time by Lovecraft’s Victorian erudites, merges with the language birthed by our culture. Reading through the piece almost necessitates a sort of mental collapse, positioning the voice of the lab onto the cosmic mouth of the world itself, in the mundane experience, “our childhood bedrooms” which “carry splattered words scorched in pungent fluid.”
Meaning as such then completely dissolves into a glorious crescendo of words, words which carry the microscopic and the specific with them, heavy and inscrutable:
“Symmetric Decompositions Justifies Intravenous Neutropenia Analysis Organs Fetid Excreachollemical Attributes During Sarna The Ruptured Filtrates Mucoviscidosis Acts Twisted Fragments And Inspiration Devourment Liquids Viscose Diffuse Fragrant Cerebro-Vascular Widespread Acro Infinitive In The Ways Tract Of Suspended Embryo-Teratoma Erosion From Development Disgust”
Without punctuation, the waterfall of words continues. Everything is proper, singular, and heavy with its own signification. Instead of finding all the names of God, Porter finds a language that names every thread, every molecule of every thread, leaving no secrets.
The monoculture thunders its difference. Naming into extinction.