The Crisis is Us!

By Maria Odete Madeira

Crisis is the generalized threatening referent and reference that pulverizes the daily cognitive dynamics of the now-human-present, with the permanent alert that it is the case that we are in the imminence of collapsing as a species, and that not even the mercantilization of the crisis, as resource to an unwise opportunistic desperate maintenance of the current structures of economic, political, military and social power, is able to erase the evidence that is there for all to see: we have arrived, as other species before us, at an evolutionary dead end which appears to menace us with the status of failed species.

As notion, crisis synthesizes a dynamics of separation, intrinsically linked to the systemic clinamen (Epicurus), understanding by clinamen a capability that the systems have to spontaneously deviate themselves from their trajectories, making obsolete the hypertextualized notion of control.

In the situations of crisis, the systems intensify, in the retension, an autopoietic of undecidability that endangers, in the protension, the concreteness of the following moment.

In the retension is: the game, the rules, the names, the verbs, the signs, the meanings, the desires, the will, the rhythms, the myths, the rites, the potency; in the protension is: the act, the fact, the event.

Any existent, each existent, is a system, be that existent a relational topos or an organism, which means that when one speaks of global systemic crisis one is signalizing a dynamics of catastrophe systemically enacted towards levels of collapse that include the extinction by disaggregation of lives, of values, of dignity, and in which the system ceases to compute itself, as systemic entity, to compute itself as a dynamics of crisis that feeds, necessarily, from the crisis itself, in desperate autophagy.

By cathexized reflexive hypertextual sublimation, the crisis has become a commodity, a product; borrowing from Baudrillard: an object disappearing in its own horizon, dragging the seduced agent. We live for the crisis, feeding ourselves from the crisis because it is all that we have, because it is all that is left of ourselves, in ourselves.

The notion of reflexivity, with origin in the Latin reflexu, synthesizes a dynamics of folding upon oneself, in oneself. In the assentment that reflexivity, in the human agents, is linked to the conscious processes/dynamics of projection of images, incorporated in the cognitive syntheses of reflexive systemic judgment production, also stated as intelligible and rational, being, precisely, the exercise of reflexivity that allows a greater interpretative effectiveness in the exchanges with the environment, indispensible to the permanent and adaptive integrity of the human systemic networks, the question occurs to us: what “kind” of phenotypic effects are being synthesized by the neurocognition of risk?

What images are we projecting of ourselves and of the world? What are we capable of perceiving, evaluating and desiring?

To what point are there being organismically blocked the homeostatic mechanisms signalizers of the presence of vital risk? And what “kind” of risk evaluations are the human agents capable of doing, as producers of a risk economy in self-sustained collapse at the point of catastrophe (in the sense of René Thom)?

Palliative solutions are, by now, a waste of time.  Either the system, in global terms, synchronizes consensually towards solutions in which all win, or it succumbs.

More and more the term revolution occurs, circulates and transhumates, but a revolution points, in radical terms, towards a change in controlling territorializing impositional leadership that may, in some way, delay an imminent collapse, or hasten it.  A revolution does not solve, and never has solved matters of nature, in this case, a nature, stated human, intersubjectively shared by the species.

The crisis is us, the change must occur in us by synchronized globalized self-determination, using the terms of Kant: in “conformity to ends”, in this case, “to ends” of survival and dignity, of the survival of each and every one, and of the inalienable and irreducible dignity of each and every one.

Editors Note: Maria Odete Madeira is an Interdisciplinary Researcher in Philosophy of Science, Ontology, Systems Science, Cognition and Neurocognition.