Part One
…
The contours of Things are contours only in a reigning consensus about how Things are (. . . ); the human-independent forces being pursued are found with human hands and felt in human hearts."
David R. Gruber,
"The brain is a blinding light".
In Edward Butler’s “The Way of Being”, he tries to articulate what “it was possible to think, and not necessarily with what was permissible or popular to think.”1 He uses this heuristic to articulate the thought-field of the socio-cultural milieu he is focusing on, describing culture as “metaphysics by diverse means.”2 Of course, culture is more than this, but it is an interesting heuristic for articulating the metaphysics of collectivities.
It’s permissible these days to spite the “masses” for not being metaphysically ept. My interactions on twitter make it very clear to me that most people aren’t even amateurs in philosophy, and its diverse jargon. Heck, even I am still an amateur and I do not know enough. However, this does not mean that sufficiently motivated people don’t think, or that the common cultural production of peoples do not produce a good enough (and even brilliant) metaphysics. They just do it by “diverse means”, using the languages and methods they do know and specialize in. Some special people have the ability to tap into this stream to weave works of art beautiful enough to harmonize some of it. Some people are on the same aggregated wavelength, you could say, as the “thought field” they live in.
This is what I see going on with the DC universe (at least, at its best) and with authors like Grant Morrison, in his Final Crisis story. One might say this is the story of Darkseid’s suicide, but fittingly for a God, his death is cosmogonic: Worlds are formed, deformed, reformed, and transformed by his death, and the process of this death. You can try to read the story yourself first – for those who don’t like spoilers – but you don’t need to read it to follow my reasoning. What you will need is an open mind, and a love of music.
Part Two
"My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my "comprehension."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Colin Smith.
"Phenomenology of perception: an introduction".
Darkseid is a God in the DC universe. Those of us familiar with him from the cartoons might think him as a punching bag; a dangerous punching bag, but a punching bag nonetheless. However, the Darkseid of the Comics is a multiversal entity, who seeks the “Anti-Life equation” to enslave all living beings and strip them of their free will. His death fall casts a shadow on the entire multiverse, centred on “Earth-0”, and we are given a mystery: There was a war in Heaven. Darkseid won, but Darkseid is falling to his death.
Morrison then draws a parallel, because it is not just Darkseid that is falling. Orion, one of his enemies, also falls to his death. But his death is so unlike Darkseid’s. While Darkseid himself falls in a way as to crash into the entire universe of Earth-0 to the latter’s “destruction”, Orion falls like an ordinary comet. He falls like a “star from heaven”. A God, whose “body” – if we can call it that – is “larger” than a universe, falls into the universe in a human appearance and in the size of an average human, to the ground, like a disturbing portent of a future event whose reality dwarves the portent by a seeming chthonic infinity.
If this is familiar, it should be. This is the description of a God taking a bodily appearance in symmetry with the plane of being it appears. Darkseid is no exception, but his manner of doing this is on a universal scale. This should bring up the question what a “body” is, and how a God can have one. To have a glimpse at the way certain philosophers understand the idea of body as something “constructed”, “constituted” or even “indefinite”, let us take a look at the physics of a body.
Bodies are often used as examples of “stable” realities. Even a “water body” is something that is relatively stationary, even if the water itself is a roiling processual liquid. However, this “stability” is, like the “body of water” shows, only a relative one, as the very flow of time shows the body as a process. In Plato’s words, in Heraclitean language, all things are in becoming. Your body is a mass of activity of subatomic particles, whose activities cancel each other out enough for the systems that are your cells, organs, etc up to the whole body, to appear stable. This activity is not just a reasonless mass of motion, but a mathematically reasonable coordination of oscillation, activity that has its rhythms and rhymes, like “music” that generates tangibility. Stability is real, a real appearance, the result of co-ordinate activity. In short, a body is an activity.
This is generalizable to any existing entity in time. Any stability they have is the result of co-ordinate activity. Liquids, solids, gases etc, are “bodies” in this respect. Even a rock is a process, the result of unimaginably complex activity in each moment. This activity is not completely sealed off from the environment. It is continuous with it, insofar as this stability is also the result of a “negotiated” interchange between the object and its “outside”; a “dance”, as it were, between the internal and external. Were something drastic to change in this economy of exchange – like a devastating fire – the object (e.g. the human being) will disintegrate. Your body is an activity that extends to the whole universe for the modicum of stability it has, although it has very little active control of that stability when compared to the universe. This “lack of control” will be key to understanding in what sense a body is an “activity” and in what sense it is “acted upon”.
This way of thinking can be extended to narratives about divine bodies. YHWH has a body in the Hebrew Bible. This body was not some otherwise inert object. It was an activity, whose existence is potent. Generally, divine bodies in myth are interpreted by Platonists as eternal activities, with a few exceptions. How can an activity be eternal, you ask? Well, let’s think about that. Note that we are assuming a realism because if these principles are not real, this discussion is pretty much pointless. You’d be better off doing something else. That’s a claim without much argument, but this is not the post for that.
Consider the principle of equality, that by which a thing can be equal to another thing. First, such a principle is active in every thing that can be equal to another thing in one respect or another. Secondly, that principle is always active, since equality falls out of the existence of anything that exists in a common space with other things. Thirdly, this activity is not a primarily temporal process; 1 + 1 is not equal to 2 by a temporal process. The equality holds immediately in the “space” where these two units – (1+1) and (2) – exist. The principle is itself active, but it is not a temporal activity. Despite having an extremely variable manifestation, It has the same effectiveness everywhere, everywhen, at once. A cub becomes equal to a mature lion in the course of time, but the equality of the once cub immediately obtains once the conditions are satisfied. To be less equal is to be unequal. The principle is not beholden to time, but is active throughout time, without division or diminution. Two examples of equality, in space or time, do not divide the principle; It is eternally active.
To say divine bodies are activities is thus not to forget what a body is, or to deny their eternity. The symbol of the divine body appropriates the ability of bodies to be divided or “broken up” into multiplicity and transposes this to divine activity. An example is the myth where Marduk uses Tiamat’s divided body to form the universe. It is not that Tiamat or Marduk are made of atoms and are simply giant physical mammals or reptiles engaging in conflict. It is that this God’s activity is the division of another God’s own activity, and this division is the reality of some principle or phenomenon we are familiar with i.e. the duality of “heaven” and “earth” as phenomenologically encountered by the average human, with the symbols produced in our attempts to organize our lives around this phenomenon as encountered. The knowledge of quasars is not usually necessary to build a house or a city, but the concept of “up” and “down” is.
With this in mind, we have better idea of what it means to say that a God “dies”. It means that their activity is one that is divided, or “gets” progressively more divided the closer it gets to our “level”. Equality as a principle does not much “care” about us, but “identity and difference” concerns us more intimately because it helps distinguish us. Social principles are natural insofar as we ourselves are natural, and they have more “resolution” with respect to us, although not much others; i.e. it can “pick out” more things in this or that aspect of their particularity. This “hierarchy” of principles can be described using their capacity to “divide” and seeing it as a descent can be used to symbolise “death”.
In Final Crisis, Orion’s death is depicted like a very human death. This is significant, because human death is basically the capitulation of the body’s relatively stable integrity to its environment. In short, the body’s tenuous “wholeness” is cut off. It is “cut off” from the universe, not by ceasing to exist completely, but by being broken down, divided up by another whole, or various many wholes – ultimately the universe itself. Orion’s body is now an “object” to be analyzed. Analysis is itself a form of division, of “disgestion”, etc. Because Orion is not a man, but a God, his remains are not consumed physically, but intellectually and sensually. As Alpha Lantern Kraken said, “The Body of a God is mostly Energy – it Sublimates without a trace” (Final Crisis - Ticket to Bludhaven), hence why one has to find his cause of death quickly and with care using advanced forensics, as Batman tries to do. Intertwined with this search for a story is also the search for a rhythm, as the various Flashes dance through dimensions in search of the tune behind this sung story, discovering death in the image of their dance, chasing them into the future they are trying to prevent. Unknowingly to all them, in trying to trace back the cause of death, they are tracing forward the form of the death. That is, they are mirroring the events that led to the death into the future. In analysing the portent, they are enacting the future it tells of.
Part Three
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“An event is the support for an infinite number of processes, processes of subjectivation, of individuation, of rationalization. Everything you’d like. Subjects are going to be born, rationalities, individualities are going to be traced, but all of that is in the events.”
Gilles Deleuze
Leibniz and the Baroque / 12
The theme that Morrison uses so expertly in this story is the DC universe’s reinterpretation of the “music of the spheres”. The Pythagoreans saw in the world a mathematical regularity that many others have used the language of “music” to describe. The DC multiverse, however, does not speak of this in the same way those ancient Pythagoreans would have thought of. They see this “music” as a much more “material” reality, as “vibration”. The flash can shift between universes by “tuning” to the “frequency” of that universe. They often use “string theory” to justify this way of describing inter-universe travel. But the point is not really the accuracy of that use of string theory – string theory doesn’t work that way as far as I know – but the theme of materiality as a perturbation, a “vibration” in an otherwise “ethereal” substance. I say “ethereal” not “immaterial” because the medium of this perturbation is entangled with other media. The closest thing to an immaterial in the DC multiverse is the “void” which is the blank, white page. But even this is not truly “immaterial”. The artist is the engineer of this space. It is where thoughts gain material substrate and representation. It is the very “matter” for the form of the story. This putting of pen to paper introduces a break in an otherwise (ideally) homogeneous perfection. In other words, the story being written, drawn, or printed is a perturbation of the homogeneous emptiness.
The story is a song sung, colourfully disturbing the still, white, “air” that is its medium. When the flash “vibrates” between universes, he is switching from one story “rhythm” – art style, language style, colour palette; that is, ways of perturbing or vibrating the white field – to another story rhythm. When Orion is “falling”, he is doing the same. When Darkseid is “falling”, he is also doing the same, but warping the story in a particular way, differently from Orion, co-opting the freedom of the characters into his own, dragging them into a “void” of a different kind, one that is the complete saturation of the page, the darkness of Mandrakk, where all stories are forgotten.
The life of these stories, purely distilled, is what the characters in the DC universe call “Bleed”, the lifeblood of their multiverse; and the inference from the existence of such a substance is that their multiverse is a living thing, or a network of living things, with a body, a body made of bodies, but whose materiality is the perturbation of a homogeneous field. It is a body that grows, “changes”, “dies”, and is “reborn”. What is interesting is the question of what processes drive the living story forward, i.e. what is the biology of the DC multiverse? Captain Adam discovers it to be the logic of a “thought robot”:
“...A thought robot activated by the tremendous energies unleashed during collisions of fundamental opposing qualities.
A new fusion process powered by... 'dualites'?
No.
There are no dualities.
Only symmetries.”
- Superman Beyond Part 2
The multiverse is a story, driven by symmetries: the symmetry of good and evil, light and darkness, friend and foe, life and death, and so on; and these are not even limited to binary symmetries. All these are perturbations that give the story the chance of a coherent life, for what is a song without symmetry? Is this not all the dance of Shiva? It is this dance that Darkseid seeks to end, although he fails.
This theme of perturbation, the metaphysics of “vibration”, is the place where Morrison and the DC multiverse place their pulse on public thinking. You see it everywhere, a relic of the “New Age”. Everyone has “energy” they “give off”. Agreement between people is them being “on the same wavelength”. People pontificate on “crystals” and “vibrations” of the universe all the time. Of course, it doesn’t make any physical sense, but that is because these people are not doing “physics” in the sense we think about. I believe Morrison has given us a way to think about this cultural language by drawing together the logic of music, storytelling, and mechanical harmonic motion. One’s story is a perturbation in an otherwise homogeneous field of sameness. To have a story is to inscribe difference into being, to be “different”. You are to “tell your story”, “speak your truth”, and so on and so forth. This is another permutation of the “vibration metaphysics”. We live in a world saturated with industry-produced music, and many of us identify with these songs. Similar media, like comics, movies, messaging apps, etc now shape our lives on a scale never before seen, and have correspondingly changed our view of what constitutes the person. The result is that the materiality of our lives is now being thought of as constituted by events, and not substances. That is, vibration metaphysics is an event-based metaphysics. Its basic unit is the event of perturbation. Events are eternalized as constitutive of a person in a new way, assisted by the advent of the internet, its interconnectivity and the seeming permanence of its records (as immortalized in the statement “the internet never forgets”). One’s life is now more and more like a comic book being written, or at least it is being seen in this fashion. We want a movie for everything, to see the events that constituted this or that life and person. We see ourselves as going through “phases” and “eras” that are only intelligible via the movies, novels, games, etc that make use of those tropes. Accordingly, we now seek stimulation in accord with those stories. We want sex to be as lively as the pornographic movie, to have the lives of our “Stars”. To generalize: we want the rhythm of the pornographic, to clip our lives, to accelerate the perturbations with cultural “vibrators”: our mass media. We now see ourselves as stories, unique unrepeatable stories, but with the danger that, in conforming our lives to our favourite stories, we might cut it short in haste. We have somehow returned to something of the logic of Stoic “Physics”; but unlike the Stoics, we have the benefit of hindsight and the denial of repetition in the name of difference.
Butler, Edward P. The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System. Notion Press, 2023. Pg 232.
Butler, Edward P. The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System. Notion Press, 2023. Pg 249.