We Are Dancing—The Empty Throne After Humanity’s Exit

On the forest paths of thought, I remain utterly at a loss…

Main Text

Something has disappeared in Lain’s gaze, disappeared above reality’s baseline. Where pure light meets matter, dismembered fragments are still dancing somewhere out of sight. Those looks that constitute being fall upon representations of representations, constructing forms anchored beneath blood-colored bones, losing their own expanse in wealth that is nowhere to be found. Machines move; God speaks. They strip away their outward forms and, as a kind of supra-visual field, make Lain appear once more, somewhere no one knows. Is it really Lain we see—is it that girl? Can we see her? Does she really exist? Where does she exist? She does not exist. She is between reality and fiction, between a vanishing existence-to-come and presence. We direct our eyes toward the screen, while Lain looks at us from a place where she cannot possibly exist—and, at the same time, from a place where we can see her and where she ought to see us. There she is, looking at us. Within this relation between seeing and being seen, Lain disappears from the first look, only to appear again somewhere we cannot see. Lain’s looking draws us into a reality of representation. And so Lain, constructed in the act of looking, brings with her, as the look returns, what has been seen in reality: Lain brings it back into Lain herself. Our looking at Lain conceals our essence as beings who are seen. When the reality of being seen returns, Lain brings into Lain what is not Lain at all. Lain becomes an ontological blank within interpretation.

In serial experiments lain, Lain—as conceptual unity and as the substantiality of the concept—is absolute self-division. She is a girl who loves. She loves Alice; what she wants to become is the determinateness of an entity. In the Wired, however, Lain is the god of information, the perfection and the pleasure of self-unity that Chisa Yomoda pursues within the concept, a believer in Masami Eiri as a god. In lain, the informational collective unconscious becomes the god of the real world. This god is Lain, is that girl, is the One: the One we human subjects dream of, the One we cannot attain yet keep pursuing—that finite suffering determined by a recurrence already negated by the infinity of presence. Lain is the unity of information, the god of the internet—or rather, humanity.

In lain, people have been distorted, turned into signs—not real people, but devils! Not real ground—bloodstains! Not real heads—puppets! Not real girls—monsters! Not real games—slaughter! Not real gods—tentacles! Everything in lain has been made to disappear by vision. Once Lain arrives, the world is no longer the world: it has split apart. Everything is broken!

Lain cannot see this world. What she sees is this world disappearing. Where has it gone? Into the Wired. The Wired already rules the real world; this world of flesh is cut apart once again by the spirit of the world, dancing within those wretched coils of magnetic field lines…

The human being is merely a construct that suddenly appeared within society. Once the biological organization of the human body finally breaks free of its external, immediate naturalness, information becomes an important link in the process of mediation. Lain is not a god who exists only in the network; the network’s existence merely allows her truly to manifest herself. As informatization intensifies, human concreteness is replaced by the universality of signs and numbers, mediated by scientific knowledge. Our dependence on technology, in turn, destroys our essence as the night of the world. We bow our heads in submission, raise both hands, prostrate ourselves before divine mystery. Under the rule of household economy, we are merely a bewildered hamster, a confessing subject staring at a white-haired witch without knowing what it is saying. In this eternal night, we abolish the independence of our own will in exchange for a One—Lain.

Masami Eiri has only one believer. His Knights have all been killed, but Lain still exists. He is the one who gave Lain a body of her own to keep forever in the real world. So long as he has Lain as his one believer, the god within information—the god waiting for you at the end of the world—will pronounce the world’s doom in those final words. One Lain is enough, because she is humanity’s lie, the essence of human existence.

In the square, in the crowd, in the street, at home, here, there: Lain is everywhere. Everywhere, she is—watching you, with that gaze of profound compassion, its pain carrying infinite loneliness and the sin of presence. Intimate conversations between girlfriends—she watches. Alienated crowds lost in a metropolis without a starry sky—she watches. At the flowering of bliss and the moment life begins, when the black hollow is filled—she still watches. Lain is untimely; she does not exist. Yet precisely because she does not exist, she can exist everywhere. Lain moves through the world. We are seen; we look.

In the pleasure of fantasy, Alice enjoys forbidden bliss:

That love which is not permitted, that forbidden love, that love which crosses the law, that primordial sin of humanity. Acknowledged only in adolescent sexual fantasy. Keep this secret—hush—hush. This is my secret, this is Alice’s secret, the secret of the woman loved by a god, that sweet secret. No one must ever know. That forbiddenness, that delirium, that unacknowledged evil—in the light, the gossip or that misguided frenzy—none of it returns. Hold the evil flower in your hand, gently close your fingers around it. Hide it, tuck it away—only then can you sing of it, delight in it. But that devil—Lain, that devil laughing wildly in the dark, wearing the clothes and skin of a god, laughing like a clown, turning into signs, turning into distortion—love, information, ethics, bliss, pleasure—the keen sword of negation pierces Alice’s body, and eternal suffering sings the praises of human civilization’s victory. With a wave of Lain’s hand, the secret emerges from absolute concealment and, in the emptiness of wine vessels, is filled with radiance and civilization.

Morality is everything. Before Lain, nothing in a person remains hidden. Lain is a spiritual guide. Before the network, we submit ourselves; out of sight, we stoop to worship. In the torrent of information, Jesus returns—he leaps down from the cross and deconstructs his own absurdity. The alchemical sorcerers are driven out, the primordial war forgotten—yet amid all this splendor and prosperity, dried bloodstains and desolate white bones lie forgotten in that great wealth. God’s order is determined at the origin of thought. We merely bring ourselves naked before Lain and look—like Alice.

But is Lain God? No. Listen—thump, thump…—Alice looks at Lain, trembling, and moves her hand as though slender lotus leaves and petals were gliding across a pale, still pond. Suddenly a hawk sounds an ancient summons; lost souls search the desert for traces of a snake; phoenixes thunder skyward; monsters in the mountains howl unseen—thump, thump… Within the girls’ intimacy, an irreparable wound is torn into life’s serenity. The band singing upon the earth begins its great rite anew. Drunken people, people who have lost their souls, carry the sword of life and raise their banners in that wilderness—thump, thump…

Alice is God’s consolation to us, a gift bestowed upon us. She is expanse, greatness, salvation, the object of Lain’s love, an object beyond her reach. Lain can only look at her; she cannot really love her, really like her. In the end, she can only stand forlorn, watching Alice and her lover walk away, alone on the bridge, walking on alone—“Alice, we’re always seeing each other!”¹

Author’s Notes

My reading here actually takes its methodological basis from Foucault’s famous interpretation of Las Meninas in The Order of Things. I have not gone very far into what I call the “supra-visual field.” This is my own concept. Of course, that is not to suggest that I am cleverer than Foucault. We cannot claim that a few small innovations mean we have surpassed a thinker of a particular period. This is simply what reading inevitably entails: the trauma that necessarily arises in reading, the impossibility of reading comprehension. Reading is impossible; understanding is traumatic, it has holes. The space between texts is like a knitted sweater: empty black holes permeate the strands between one discourse and another. They still await interpretation to fill them, still await being placed under bright lights and cut lengthwise and crosswise by a scalpel. After interpretation, only dried bloodstains remain, only the violence that cannot be seen once the subject has disappeared.

Here we need to break free of the traditional understanding of looking as a physical act. In his interpretation of Foucault, Deleuze said that Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas was fundamentally a spiral configuration of optical reflections. We need some imagination, some thought beyond dead images of things and representations, some thought beyond this world. This is not the look of an image of a thing, not a look that represents things, not the logocentrism that distances things from us, but an ontological constitution. It is a poetic space—that is, a space of creation. Poiēsis means creation in Greek. Poetry, then, is creation: a wandering whose boundaries cannot be seen, with distance, with sound, with the faint sound of wind, with wide-open fields, with nature and its many running beasts. Lewis believes that every word houses someone, a wordless beauty whose nature we cannot express: a world, a word, housing starry skies, seas, beaches, children at play, housing the radiance of God as it shines through the mystery of the firmament in points of starlight. This is a beauty beyond words. In his short essay “Wordless Beauty” (无言之美), Zhu Guangqian says that beauty is precisely wordless, inexpressible: it is expanse, an unsayable limit. Kant calls this astonishment the sublime, a sublimity turned toward reason. But perhaps we should reverse this: it is reason’s own fear, fear in the face of infinity, an unsayable fear. This is an aesthetic creation, a diagram, a language, a force that representation cannot reach. This, too, is what it means for the look to arrive, what it means for God to strip away his outward form, what the blood-colored bones mean.

By wealth I do not mean material wealth. Wealth is, in fact, a danger that does not exist at all: a condition of having nothing to hold to, attainable only through releasement, breathing in the vital energies of heaven and earth, forgoing the five grains, drifting between heaven and earth. Of course this is impossible. Such a pursuit must mean losing oneself in a mirror image.

In the view of the French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler, the takeover of human memory by external technical tools for storing information has produced a global cognitive proletariat. The entire world will become a One with a capital O, wholly shaped within what the philosopher of technology Leroi-Gourhan calls a technical vector field, unable to resist. In this article I identify Lain in the Wired as this One. Within the network, everyone’s consciousness will be completely unified as geography is erased.

What I call infinity is an important concept in Anaximander; what I call recurrence discloses the secret of the being of beings in Anaximenes’ pronouncement of judgment.²

As for mystery here: the word oikonomia originally meant the management of a household. Through Christianity’s complex development, it came to carry a certain divine responsibility, a responsibility we cannot help but assume for governing the world, a necessity of grasping the world. This is the management of household economy (economic). This economic then became the terminology of Adam Smith’s economics, while God’s order became the objective laws of development within market logic, became nature’s policy (economy of nature). The government of the kingdom of heaven (gouvernement économique d’un royaume) became natural order (ordre naturel plus avantageux). This is a hidden overlap.

In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben discusses how power, in the form of Kingship with a capital K, actually comes from God’s order. Kingship itself is an emptiness. This is also what I mean by the “empty throne” in my title.

The confessing subject is a mode of subject-formation that Foucault began to discover in The History of Sexuality: the hermeneutics of the self. Foucault said, “For a long time now, Western man has been entirely a confessing animal.”³

The hamster is a metaphor from Alexander of Aphrodisias. Before the gods, we are like a hamster in a room. Only occasionally do the great gods bestow a favor; we need to grasp it—that is, divine grace.

The white-haired witch is the sovereign within the ritual. She presides over the secret of how human beings are constituted. The witch is not a real being. Cassian once discussed our route into the sacred in “The Battle for Chastity.”⁴ In fact, on the ontological level, an unseen witch stands there pointing her magic wand, directing what you are to do.

The expulsion of the alchemical sorcerers and the forgetting of the primordial war likewise do not refer to actual events. The alchemical sorcerers express the following condition: in ancient Greek, art or craft is technē, the realization of a thing’s energeia. That is, through poiēsis, the work (ergon) opens under its appearance (eidos), emerging within physis (nature) toward entelecheia, or a certain to telos (boundary). Alchemical magic is a change in physis itself, not an absurd illusion. As for the primordial war, Heidegger says in Introduction to Metaphysics: “Division and struggle are the mother of all that is present. They let everything dawn, let some appear as gods, some as human beings, some as slaves, and others as slaves.”⁵ This is what is called polemos (rending). Polemos is also Sammlung, gathering—that is, logos. Things unfold within this rending. This is what is called war, what is called “das im Denken noch unbewältigt überwältigende An-wesen”—in other words, the object of thought, Being.⁶

The desert and the snake refer to a theological story. In antiquity, the snake had a meaning associated with recurrence; it is a frequently appearing mystical trace.

The band singing upon the earth embodies the will to life, the Dionysian spirit, the power of Dionysus depicted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. It is life rushing across the earth. For the details, please read The Birth of Tragedy.

There does seem to be a lot of literary rhetoric in this piece. A lot of people will think I’m showing off, but I’m really not. In fact, I think that with this piece, you needn’t puzzle over exactly what it says, and above all, don’t pick it apart word by word. As Ye Shengtao said, put your imagination to work. Imagine those scenes, and you will find something in the reading. I, the author, am already dead; the rest is up to you. I’ll join you in the audience and watch.

Editor’s note: I get it, I get it. Still, lain itself is quite an extraordinary work. This article is the annotated version of “We Are Dancing—The Empty Throne After Humanity’s Exit (Complete Version)”.

Translator’s Notes