The unprethinkable

Covid-19 is a quantum revolution flipping phenomenological platforms, disturbing spaces in 3D to accomodate a word line in 4D perspective (as it does when it kills everyone’s expectation before killing their lungs). It exhibits the property of Timothy Morton’s hyperobject: when you’re looking at covid-19 (phenomenologically as it disturbs comfort zones, existential modalities, and commonsense experience of space) you’re actually looking at an object tracing a timescale at present back to the future of the past. It’s not hard to grasp. Experience is actually happening in fourdimensional spacetime but your phenomenological rootedness in the present blurs your perception of an object tracing a temporal scale in space as a simultaneity of past, present and future. Until the virus rushed into the scene, our experience of spacetime is marked by common perceptive borders and temporal succession that complement a safe operating ecology. The virus is flipping that spacetime experience of the common into a modal experience of havoc that happens everyday on the quantum level.

In eveyday common phenomenological experience, the farthest quantum range with which we can make sense of this viral experience (vicarious, to say the least, pray it stays that way) is what the ancient Greeks would have pictured an unfamiliar experience of divine chaos, a tragic oneness (as Schelling would have it) with the unprethinkability of geology or the ages of the world. This of course is mediated by aesthetic consciousness, the speculative attractor of phenomenologically impossible experience of clashing infinites, of the abyss of the past and infinite progression. Suffice it to say the Greeks produced their great tragedies after riding out a plaque, after dancing about the image of a burning star in fourdimensional horizon that is nothing for ordinary experience. But what is nothing for ordinary experience makes up for what is modally conceivable – the aesthetic experience of synthetic a priori…’