\PassOptionsToPackage{unicode=true}{hyperref} % options for packages loaded elsewhere
\PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url}
%
\documentclass[a4paperpaper,]{article}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\usepackage{ifxetex,ifluatex}
\usepackage{fixltx2e} % provides \textsubscript
\ifnum 0\ifxetex 1\fi\ifluatex 1\fi=0 % if pdftex
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage{textcomp} % provides euro and other symbols
\else % if luatex or xelatex
  \usepackage{unicode-math}
  \defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX,Scale=MatchLowercase}
\fi
% use upquote if available, for straight quotes in verbatim environments
\IfFileExists{upquote.sty}{\usepackage{upquote}}{}
% use microtype if available
\IfFileExists{microtype.sty}{%
\usepackage[]{microtype}
\UseMicrotypeSet[protrusion]{basicmath} % disable protrusion for tt fonts
}{}
\IfFileExists{parskip.sty}{%
\usepackage{parskip}
}{% else
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\setlength{\parskip}{6pt plus 2pt minus 1pt}
}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
            pdftitle={Deus Ex Machina: Eschatologies of Automation in Seventeenth-Century Lullism and Present-day Post-Scarcity Utopias},
            pdfauthor={Florian Cramer},
            pdfborder={0 0 0},
            breaklinks=true}
\urlstyle{same}  % don't use monospace font for urls
\setlength{\emergencystretch}{3em}  % prevent overfull lines
\providecommand{\tightlist}{%
  \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
% Redefines (sub)paragraphs to behave more like sections
\ifx\paragraph\undefined\else
\let\oldparagraph\paragraph
\renewcommand{\paragraph}[1]{\oldparagraph{#1}\mbox{}}
\fi
\ifx\subparagraph\undefined\else
\let\oldsubparagraph\subparagraph
\renewcommand{\subparagraph}[1]{\oldsubparagraph{#1}\mbox{}}
\fi

% set default figure placement to htbp
\makeatletter
\def\fps@figure{htbp}
\makeatother


\title{Deus Ex Machina: Eschatologies of Automation in Seventeenth-Century
Lullism and Present-day Post-Scarcity Utopias}
\author{Florian Cramer}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\hypertarget{lullism-singularity-accelerationism}{%
\section{Lullism, Singularity,
Accelerationism}\label{lullism-singularity-accelerationism}}

Llull's Art was syncretic in its time.\footnote{``Lull was quite
  explicit: he had borrowed his terms from the Arabs. Lull was searching
  for a set of elementary and primary notions that Christians held in
  common with the infidels. {[}\ldots{}{]}: One is tempted to see in
  Lull's series the ten Sefirot of the kabbala, but Platzeck observes
  (1953--1954: 583) that a similar list of Dignities is to be found in
  the Koran. Yates (1960) identified the thought of John Scot Erigene as
  a direct source, but Lull might have discovered analogous lists in
  various other medieval Neo-Platonic texts -- the commentaries of
  pseudo-Dionysius, the Augustinian tradition, or the medieval doctrine
  of the transcendental properties of being.'' Umberto Eco, \emph{The
  Search for the Perfect Language} (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 66.}
By the end of the seventeenth century, it had mutated into speculations
and utopias, many of which could be called ``science fiction'' in the
literal sense of these words. The intellectual movement of Lullism
involved prominent philosophers and scientists, from the French polymath
Marin Mersenne to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, as well as mystics and
poets.\footnote{For extensive overviews and discussion, see Paolo Rossi,
  \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal
  Language}, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Frances
  Yates, \emph{The Art of Memory} (London: Random House, 2014); and
  Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, \emph{Topica Universalis: Eine
  Modellgeschichte Humanistischer und Barocker Wissenschaft} (Hamburg:
  Meiner, 1983). I covered Lullist poetics in my own book:
  \emph{Exe.cut(up)able statements: Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des
  selbstausführenden Texts} (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011); and reuse some
  of my findings here.} This movement continued and extended the
original Art by marrying it with tendencies of its own time: universal
science, automation, technological and speculative project
entrepreneurship.

In 1674, the poet, self-styled polymath, and mystical prophet Quirinus
Kuhlmann envisioned to widen the Art of Llull (for whom he had written a
poetic eulogy in 1670) and its subsequent extensions by
seventeenth-century Lullists\footnote{Kuhlmann credits, among others,
  the mathematician and musicologist Marin Mersenne, the Jesuit polymath
  Athanasius Kircher, the jurist and Lullist poet Thomas Lansius, the
  poets Daniel Schwenter and Georg Philipp Harsdörffer but still finds
  their work insufficient. See Quirinus Kuhlmann, \emph{A.Z. Quirin
  Kuhlmanns Breßlauer Lehrreicher Geschicht-Herold Oder Freudige Und
  Trauriger Begebenheiten Hoher Und Nidriger Personen {[}\ldots{}{]}}
  (Jena: Johann Meyer, 1673).} into nineteen combinatorial systems that
cover the domains of poetics, rhetoric and composition, didactics,
philology, politics, history, law, cosmology, and theology: an ``Ars
apophthegmatica,'' ``Ars tragica,'' ``Ars comica,'' ``Ars magna poëtica,
versificatoria, rythmica {[}sic{]},'' ``Ars magna eloquentiae,'' ``Ars
magna sciendi,'' ``Ars magna scribendi,'' ``Ars magna linguas
discendi,'' ``Ars magna commentandi,'' ``Ars magna critices,'' ``Ars
magna seu harmonia adagiorum omnium populorum,'' ``Ars magna historiae
specialis hominis,'' ``Homo microcosmus,'' ``Homo Deus,'' ``Homo
diabolus,'' ``Resurrectio,'' ``Illustres seculi hujus centumviri,''
``Ars magna antiquitatis,'' ``Tacitus politicus.''\footnote{Quirinus
  Kuhlmann, \emph{Quirini Kuhlmanni Prodomus} (Amsterdam: Lotho de Haes,
  1674), 15.}

The Ars magna scribendi is envisioned by Kuhlmann as a system that
mechanically writes all books of the world -- every existing as well as
every future one -- by generating every possible letter combination.
Kuhlmann writes that this system is ``of such perfection that no mortal
being will be able to publish a book that our Ars magna scribendi
wouldn't already contain.''\footnote{``tanta perfectione, ut nullus
  Mortalium librum edere posset, quem nostra Ars scribendi non
  comprehenderet,'' Kuhlmann, \emph{Quirini Kuhlmann Prodomus}, 17.} It
thus ``grasps everything that all people can grasp and, through
combinatorial permutation, teaches everything that can be
taught.''\footnote{``die große Bücherschreibungskunst / welche alles
  begreifet / was alle Menschen begreiffen / und durch einen
  gegeneinanderhaltungswechsel alles belehret / was belehret werden
  kont,'' Kuhlmann, \emph{A.Z. Quirin Kuhlmanns Breßlauer Lehrreicher
  Geschicht-Herold}, § 27.}

Such baroque Lullist visions were parodied, half a century later, by
Jonathan Swift in a chapter of \emph{Gulliver's Travels} (see p.~XX,
fig. 6 in this volume). The Grand Academy of Lagado runs a Lullist
machine in the form of a ``frame'' that mechanically shuffles letter
combinations so that ``the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge,
and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry,
Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance
from Genius or Study.''\footnote{Jonathan Swift, \emph{Gulliver's
  Travels}, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965).} Lullism
also provided the model for Jorge Luis Borges's twentieth-century
fantastic short story \emph{The Library of Babel}, the ultimate library
containing books with every possible letter combination whose structure
can only be grasped through ``combinatorial analysis.''\footnote{Jorge
  Luis Borges, ``La Biblioteca de Babel,'' in \emph{Obras Completas},
  3rd ed. (1993), 1:465--471.}

The automated ``artes'' and machine-generated knowledge imagined by
Kuhlmann and other Lullists have striking parallels with today's
automation and artificial intelligence (AI) visions.\footnote{This
  parallel was suggested as early as in the 1990s and studied more
  comprehensively by Stefan Rieger, \emph{Speichern / Merken. Die
  künstlichen Intelligenzen des Barock} (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999).}
With all necessary caution in the comparison of two different historical
eras, it seems fair to say that the techno-epistemological breakthrough
envisioned by Kuhlmann is analogous to the so-called ``technological
singularity,'' the eclipse of human intelligence through computers
envisioned by today's most optimistic AI advocates. The Singularity
discourse, most prominently represented by engineer Ray Kurzweil and
Google's \emph{Singularity University}, conversely bears traits of
evangelical, apocalyptic Christianity that was Kuhlmann's religion and
gospel. Kuhlmann ended his life as a wandering prophet and self-styled
``son of the son of God'' who was burned at the stake for heresy.
Kurzweil advocated his technological singularity hypothesis in a book
with the telling eschatological title \emph{The Singularity Is Near:
When Humans Transcend Biology}.\footnote{Ray Kurzweil, \emph{The
  Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology} (New York: Penguin
  Books, 2005).} The Singularity movement has often been likened to an
evangelical cult both by journalists and religion scholars.\footnote{Amarnath
  Amarasingam, ``Transcending Technology: Looking at Futurology as a New
  Religious Movement,'' in \emph{Journal of Contemporary Religion} 23,
  no. 1 (2008): 1--16; Ronald Cole-Turner, ``The Singularity and the
  Rapture: Transhumanist and Popular Christian Views of the Future,'' in
  \emph{Zygon®}, vol.~47, no. 4 (2012): 777--796; Diane Proudfoot,
  ``Software Immortals: Science or Faith?'' in \emph{Singularity
  Hypotheses}, ed. Amnon H. Eden, James H. Moore, Johnny H. Soraker, and
  Eric Steinhart (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 367--392; Wolfram Klinger,
  ``Silicon Valley's Radical Machine Cult,'' in \emph{Motherboard},
  11/10/2017, available online at:
  https://motherboard.vice.com/en\_us/article/kz7jem/silicon-valley-digitalism-machine-religion-artificial-intelligence-christianity-singularity-google-facebook-cult,
  accessed 05.05.2018.}

While the Singularity movement remains closely tied to ``The Californian
Ideology''\footnote{Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ``The Californian
  Ideology,'' in \emph{Science as Culture} 6, no. 1 (1996): 44--72, doi:
  https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439609526455.} of Silicon Valley and its
Internet corporations, it has relatives in left-wing counterculture and
political activism that advocate ``total automation'' as way out of wage
work and capitalism. (Both the Singularity movement and contemporary
post-work movements were influenced by the same 1960s counterculture;
this will be discussed later.) For Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, who
became known as the authors of the 2013 \emph{\#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for
an Accelerationist Politics}, ``{[}t{]}he newest wave of automation is
creating the possibility for huge swathes of boring and demeaning work
to be permanently eliminated.''\footnote{Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams,
  \emph{Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work},
  rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2016), 2--3.} This hypothesis leads to the
central thesis of their book \emph{Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism
and a World Without Work}: ``Many of the classic demands of the left --
for less work, for an end to scarcity, for economic democracy, for the
production of socially useful goods, and for the liberation of humanity
-- are materially more achievable than at any other point in
history.''\footnote{Ibid.}

The book, however, lacks a genuine investigation or proofs of its
sweeping technological claims and conducts no in-depth analysis of the
actual possibilities and limitations of current technology. Instead, it
winds up with the dogma that ``{[}f{]}ull automation is something that
can and should be achieved, regardless of whether it is yet being
carried out.''\footnote{Ibid., 112.}

It is outside the scope of this essay to scrutinize the feasibility of
the technological utopias and eschatologies propounded by Kuhlmann,
Kurzweil, or Williams and Srnicek. It must suffice here to summarize
their success or lack thereof: Kuhlmann's attempts to automate his own
permutational poetry with a ``permutation wheel'' only succeeded on
paper, not in reality.\footnote{Cramer, \emph{Exe.cut(up)able
  statements}, 127--133.} Kurzweil's \emph{Singularity} is founded on
greatly simplified notions of intelligence and cognition (and therefore
not shared by the AI scientific community at large) while the
much-reported recent breakthroughs in AI concern only one field and
application of AI: pattern recognition through deep learning neural
network processing of large data sets. Finally, hopes of obsoleting work
through automation ignore the massive ecological footprint and massive
amount of maintenance labor that is necessary to keep systems running:
materials and energy supply for running robots and computer networks,
periodic necessary renewal of fiber optics, and the massive amount of
work necessary for software maintenance. The complexities of providing
housing, food and health for a growing world population in times of
shrinking natural resources are not even considered. All techno-utopian
visions willfully ignore the real-life \emph{crapularity} (as opposed to
the Singularity) of systems malfunctioning, being riddled with
construction flaws, being hacked and getting ``wildly out of
control'';\footnote{Justin Pickard in Noah Raford, John A. Sweeney, and
  Justin Pickard, \emph{Alternatives to the Singularity} (2011),
  available online at:
  https://web.archive.org/web/20120916123714/http://www.scribd.com/doc/62056338/Alternatives-to-the-Singularity,
  accessed 05.05.2018.} serious issues of today's computer technology,
which have not been solved but have worsened the more complex the
designs and networks of hardware and software have become.

Leaving these issues aside, the same leitmotifs reappear in the
different historical periods and discourses from utopian Lullism to
utopian accelerationism: automation and computation as forces that are
expected to revolutionize knowledge, cognition, and labor; and the
creation of new classes of project developers, from the polymaths,
project makers, and prophets of the seventeenth century to startup
companies, artists, activists, writers, and techno evangelists in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

\hypertarget{revisiting-the-art-of-ramon-llull}{%
\section{Revisiting the Art of Ramon
Llull}\label{revisiting-the-art-of-ramon-llull}}

Llull's Art was a system for generating and modifying statements based
on formal combinatorial rules, with single letters as placeholders for
concepts. Since the Art seemingly provides a formalized way of
generating valid statements from existing valid statements, it has been
interpreted as a proto-computer and a precursor to the formal logical
reasoning of analytic philosophy. Close observation, however, shows that
the latter is not the case, since unwanted statements like ``Goodness is
the opposite of Truth'' or ``God is equivalent to Impermanence'' can be
created with its figures and tables.\footnote{See Cramer,
  \emph{Exe.cut(up)able statements}, 54.} Umberto Eco therefore
concludes that Llull's Art cannot ``really be considered a logical
instrument at all'' but ``is, in reality, a sort of dialectical
thesaurus, a mnemonic aid for finding out an array of standard arguments
able to demonstrate an already known truth.''\footnote{Eco, \emph{The
  Search for the Perfect Language}, 63.} Alternatively, it could be
called a poetics: a science based on creation (\emph{poeisis}) instead
of observation (as in modern empirical science), and a system in which
science and mysticism as well as science and art were not yet
differentiated from each other.

Llull's book \emph{Tree of Science} (\emph{Arbor scientiae}) published
in 1296, nine years before the \emph{Ars magna} or \emph{Ars generalis
ultima}, proposed the integration of sciences into one comprehensive
system that provided a common foundation for each of them.\footnote{Rossi,
  \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory}, 37--37.} Its model and way of
structuring knowledge conformed to medieval scholastic science and
Aristotle's categories (which also formed the grammatical model for the
statements generated through the Art). Eco observes that

\begin{quote}
the Art became a means of treating the entire range of knowledge,
drawing suggestions from the numerous medieval encyclopedias, and
anticipating the encyclopedic dreams of the Renaissance and the Baroque.
All this knowledge, however, needed to be ordered
hierarchically.\footnote{Eco, \emph{The Search for the Perfect
  Language}, 67.}
\end{quote}

The \emph{Tree of Science} and the \emph{Ars magna} thus not only laid
the groundwork for a new type of encyclopedia, but -- as philosopher
Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann points out -- for encyclopedism as
philosophy.\footnote{``Der Begriff Enzyklopädie übernahm die Funktion
  des ganz weiten, wissenschaftskonstitutiven Philosophiebegriffs.''
  Schmidt-Biggemann, \emph{Topica Universalis}, 132.} Yet for Eco,
Llull's original Art is still limited to functioning as ``a rhetorical
instrument {[}\ldots{}{]} designed to demonstrate what was already
known, and lock it for ever in the steely cage of the system of
trees.''\footnote{Eco, \emph{The Search for the Perfect Language}, 69; a
  view shared by Schmidt-Biggemann who states that combinatorics was
  limited to invention, but wasn't capable of judgment, which made the
  limitations of Lullism visible when it progressed towards
  representation of science (``Es konnte die Kombinatorik immer nur
  Invention sein, nie auch Judicium. Ohne eine Vorrangsbeschreibung des
  Judiciums, wie sie im Ramismus vorlag, war die
  Wissenschaftskonstitution nicht zu begründen. Deshalb war der Obergang
  von der kombinatorischen Invention zu einer Darstellung der
  Wissenschaften abrupt und unvermittelt, ein Bruch, der auch die
  Leistungsgrenzen des Lullismus indizierte''); Schmidt-Biggemann sees
  the same deficiences in seventeenth-century encyclopedic Lullism, such
  as in the Art of Athanasius Kircher, see Schmidt-Biggemann,
  \emph{Topica Universalis}, 185--186.}

\hypertarget{lullist-encyclopedism-in-the-seventeenth-century}{%
\section{Lullist Encyclopedism in the Seventeenth
Century}\label{lullist-encyclopedism-in-the-seventeenth-century}}

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century Lullism, the Art -- now often
referred to as \emph{Ars combinatoria} -- had evolved beyond a tool for
the creation of statements into an all-comprehensive epistemological
instrument. It was meant to integrate all sciences and include exoteric
as well as esoteric knowledge. Paolo Rossi, author of one of the
preeminent histories of Renaissance Lullism, calls it an ``interest in
the Cabala and hieroglyphic writing, artificial and universal languages,
the search for the primary constitutive principles of all possible
knowledge, the art of memory and a preoccupation with logic understood
as a `key' to the hidden secrets of reality.'' For Rossi, ``all these
themes were connected to the revival of Lullism in the
Renaissance.''\footnote{Rossi, \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory}, 29.}
With occult science still being part of the scientific canon, even the
hermetic combinatory memory system of the alchemist and Rosicrucian
Robert Fludd belongs to its discourse and history.\footnote{See Rossi,
  \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory}, and Yates, \emph{The Art of
  Memory}.}

The promise of Lullist combinatorics thus was to organize all existing
knowledge and to create -- or even automatically generate and decode --
hidden and new knowledge in its computations. This way, the Lullist Art
became a poetics of knowledge in the most comprehensive sense. With its
mystical precursors in Llull himself, followed in the sixteenth century
by Giordano Bruno, Pico della Mirandola, and Cornelius
Agrippa,\footnote{Rossi, \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory}, 31;
  Schmidt-Biggemann, \emph{Topica Universalis}, 159.} the Art
subsequently branched out into, among others, musicology (such as in
Marin Mersenne's \emph{Harmonie universelle} and the system for
formalized and automated music composition in Athanasius Kircher's
\emph{Musurgia universalis}),\footnote{Marin Mersenne, \emph{Harmonie
  Universelle: Contenant La Théorie et La Pratique de La Musique}
  (Paris: 1636), vol.~2 (Paris: Editions du centre national de la
  recherche scientifique, 1975); Athanasius Kircher, \emph{Musurgia
  universalis}, vol.~1, (Hildesheim: Olms, 1970).} permutational
poetry,\footnote{Cramer, \emph{Exe.cut(up)able statements}, 55--155.}
linguistics (such as in the lexical combination wheel of German poet
Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and the universal language project of John
Wilkins at the Royal Society of London),\footnote{Georg Philipp
  Harsdörffer, \emph{Poetischer Trichter} (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
  Buchgesellschaft, 1969); John Wilkins, \emph{An Essay Towards a Real
  Character, And a Philosophical Language} (London: Royal Society,
  1668).} didactics of language,\footnote{Stanislaus Mink von Weinsheun,
  \emph{Proteus. Das Ist: Eine Unglaubliche Lustnützliche Lehrart / in
  Kurzer Zeit / Ohne Müh Deutsch- Und Lateinische Vers Zumachen / Auch
  Einen Französischen Und Lateinischen Brief Zuschreiben} (Oldenburg:
  Henrich-Conrad Zimmer, 1657).} and mathematics (with the construction
of mechanical calculation machines such as the \emph{cistula} of the
Jesuit Caspar Schott).\footnote{Johann Kaspar Schott, \emph{Organum
  mathematicum} (Würzburg, 1668).} In all these disciplines, Lullists
used combinatorial computation of predefined sets of elements (such as
musical notes, letters, words, and numbers) as an encyclopedic device.
The aim was to exhaust the possibilities of permutation and combination
and thus create complete generative systems for a language's lexicon or
for musical composition. In practice, however, none of these systems
lived up to this ambition.

With Johann Heinrich Alsted's \emph{Encyclopaedia} of 1630,
seventeenth-century Lullism produced a classic printed encyclopedia.
Rossi characterizes it as a project of a ``new `system' of the sciences,
which would unify the principles of all the disciplines in a single
corpus.''\footnote{Rossi, \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory}, 130;
  Johann Heinrich Alsted, \emph{Encyclopaedia}, 4 vols. (Stuttgart
  (Herborn): Holzboog, 1989); Schmidt-Biggemann, \emph{Topica
  Universalis}, 102.} Schmidt-Biggemann, who oversaw its modern reprint,
describes Alsted's work as a life-long and increasingly complex endeavor
of ``establishing universal science on Lullist grounds.''\footnote{``Was
  er in der Clavis Lulliana begonnen hatte, steigerte Alsted in drei
  Traktaten zu einem Versuch, die Gesamtwissenschaft lullistisch zu
  begründen,'' Ibid.}

The ``construction of total encyclopaedias and ordered classifications''
in seventeenth-century Lullism served, to use Rossi's words, the
objective of creating ``true `mirrors' of cosmic harmony.''\footnote{Rossi,
  \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory}, xv.} In addition to an
Aristotelian-scholastic paradigm of systems of categories, Lullism was
therefore indebted to Pythagorean and Neoplatonist thinking that
conceived of the world as corresponding macro- and microcosmic spheres,
a cosmology of \emph{as above so below}. Alsted's encyclopedia and all
other Lullist systems were structured accordingly.

Before the \emph{Encyclopédie} of Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le
Rond d'Alembert in the eighteenth century, the organization of
encyclopedias according to alphabet -- and thus in an arbitrary order
instead of systematic taxonomies and classifications of knowledge -- had
not existed. Diderot's and d'Alembert's revolution marked the victory of
Enlightenment empiricism and the defeat of universal knowledge systems
based on holistic cosmologies. Through the new science, poetics,
mysticism, and the occult were ultimately pushed out of the canon. The
end of comprehensive cosmologies and taxonomies of knowledge meant the
end of the assumption of an overcoupling harmonic structure of the
world.

However, the problem that Lullist encyclopedism addressed in the
seventeenth century, on the historical threshold between medieval and
modern science, was different from the issue that Llull's Art had
addressed in its own time. Seventeenth-century Lullism was not so much
concerned with universal \emph{truth} (which is why Eco sees the Art as
an ``instrument to convert the infidels'' with their own, kabbalistic
devices, after ``Lull had devoted years to the study of the doctrines of
the Jews and Arabs''),\footnote{Eco, \emph{The Search for the Perfect
  Language}, 66.} but rather with universal \emph{knowledge}. This
reflects the growing difficulty of keeping a grip on human knowledge as
one whole; systematizing, relating, and ordering it. Most of its
practitioners were therefore polymaths, such as Mersenne, Kircher,
Alsted, and Kuhlmann who fought a last battle for their concept of
science.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the difficulties of encyclopedic
Lullism to live up to its grand promises became obvious. In Quirinus
Kuhlmann's poetry, the Art is a practical composition device -- such as
for a sonnet whose words can be shuffled so that
7.5*10\textsuperscript{275} combinatorial permutations of the poem are
possible. In his prose, it serves as a speculative horizon of a total
art and science. But the two never merged. To phrase it in contemporary
terminology, there was a constant promise of a combinatorial
``Singularity'' in the seventeenth century, but it remained the promise
of a start-up endeavor that failed to live up to its expectations.

The parallel between seventeenth-century and twenty-first century
techno-scientific enterprises is less metaphoric than one might think.
Most Lullist science was developed outside traditional universities in
the upcoming academies, which were self-organized, non-institutional
communities of scholars at that time. On top of that, Lullism played a
role in seventeenth-century project making. Project makers, such as the
German Johann Joachim Becher (but also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz), were
independent entrepreneurs and self-made men who travelled from court to
court to pitch and, in the best case, execute speculative development
projects, including making gold out of sand, the enlargement of rivers,
the creation of new economic systems, or -- like Becher's
\emph{Werkhaus} project in Vienna -- what can be called straightforward
forerunners of today's Fab Labs and Maker Spaces. (Becher founded it
with the promise of fighting unemployment in economically depressed
Vienna.) Their ways of working greatly resembled those of contemporary
technology start-up companies. Project makers would pitch a disruptive
techno-economical innovation to be developed, collect venture capital
(in the seventeenth century: from aristocrats), and execute the project
with a team, risking either failure or success. In such projects, the
larger horizon of universal science and knowledge systems worked in
similar ways as today's horizon of AI; ``Singularity'' increases
investor faith in such speculative technologies as cryptocurrencies and
self-driving cars.

Becher's projects included, according to Quirinus Kuhlmann,
combinatorial machine translation through a contraption consisting of
50,000 dice with glued-on Latin and German words.\footnote{Cramer,
  \emph{Exe.cut(up)able statements}, 158.} Such inventions were in tune
with seventeenth-century Lullist use of combinatorial systems for the
acceleration of learning which, in Rossi's words, ``could transform an
ignorant and unlettered youth into a wise man (whose abilities to
understand and to act would be far greater than those who had been
trained in traditional logic and philosophy) in an extraordinarily brief
time (authors vary in their estimates between a month and two
years).''\footnote{Rossi, \emph{Logic and the Art of Memory}, 44.}

Lullists such as the poet Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and the
educationalist Johann Justus Winkelmann, who wrote under the
anagrammatic pseudonym Stanislaus Mink von Weinsheun, saw word
combinatorics as a way of teaching the composition of poetry to
anyone.\footnote{Cramer, \emph{Exe.cut(up)able statements}, 83; Rieger,
  \emph{Speichern / Merken}, 20; Anita Traninger, \emph{Mühelose
  Wissenschaft. Lullismus und Rhetorik in den deutschsprachigen Ländern
  der Frühen Neuzeit} (Munich: Fink, 2001), 193.} Their systems
anticipate today's AI applications such as the automated personal
assistants in audiovisual editing software, and Google Clips, a wireless
smart camera launched in 2018 that takes video snippets on its own and
automatically selects the best based on machine learning of good
photographic composition.

In the 1670s, Kuhlmann ended up in an argument with Athanasius Kircher
who, citing his device of a ``box'' (``cista'') to enable non-musicians
to compose music, claimed that any child could learn to write poetry by
combinatorial means (see p.~XX, fig. 7, this volume). Kuhlmann didn't
dispute the technical feasibility, but argued that this would merely
yield versification, not real poetry,\footnote{Cramer,
  \emph{Exe.cut(up)able statements}, 286.} thus insisting on a
metaphysical practice of Llull's Art. Nevertheless, the application of
that Art had been increasingly narrowed down to language and writing,
not just in Kuhlmann's and Kircher's examples, but also at the British
Royal Society where John Wilkins published his Lullist
\emph{Philosophical Language}.\footnote{Wilkins, \emph{An Essay Towards
  a Real Character}.} For Schmidt-Biggemann, this is a design issue of
Llull's Art as such, since it had been ``developed as a universal
language to convert the infidels,'' on the basis of a combinatorics of
topics universalia that ``were all linguistically
constituted.''\footnote{``Es war die lullistische Kunst zunächst als
  Universalsprache für die Bekehrung der Heiden entwickelt worden, und
  ihre Grundlagen, die Argumentation mit topisch gefaßten Universalien
  und deren Kombination, waren allemal sprachlich konstituiert und als
  Sprachtheorie denkbar.'' Schmidt-Biggemann, \emph{Topica Universalis},
  176.}

In this way, seventeenth-century Lullism was caught in a tension between
mere technical applications of its combinatorial art, including the
entrepreneurship of project making, its speculative aspirations towards
universal knowledge creation and, last but not least, what
Schmidt-Biggemann calls its hidden yet powerful ``concept for
participating in the divine truth.''\footnote{``Die Präsenz des
  Lullismus im 17. Jahrhundert lag nicht allein in der möglichen -- oder
  unmöglichen -- Anwendung von Kreisen oder Tafeln der lullistischen
  Kunst auf Magie und/oder Universalwissenschaft. Verborgen, aber
  deshalb wohl um so wirksamer, blieb die lullistische Kunst im
  Teilhabekonzept an der göttlichen Wahrheit.'' Ibid., 156.}

Computation, in other words, was eschatological. At least for
apocalyptic mystics like Kuhlmann, it was part of an endgame that was
both epistemological and spiritual. The completion of a project like his
Ars magna scribendi (where, to quote it again, ``\emph{no mortal being
will be able to publish a book that our Ars scribendi wouldn't already
contain}'')\footnote{Kuhlmann, \emph{Quirini Kuhlmann Prodomus}, 17.
  Translated from the Latin.} would have meant the end of literature and
philosophy, and of intellectual labor as a whole.

\hypertarget{automation-and-leisure-society-in-the-twentieth-and-twenty-first-centuries}{%
\section{Automation and Leisure Society in the Twentieth and
Twenty-first
Centuries}\label{automation-and-leisure-society-in-the-twentieth-and-twenty-first-centuries}}

In his later career, Kuhlmann shifted the grounds of his eschatology
from the arts and sciences to millenarist prophecy, and to salvation
through the reign of God on Earth. In his 1957 monograph \emph{The
Pursuit of the Millennium}, Norman Cohn reconstructs the history of
European millenarist movements and their partial ``anarcho-communism''
in the late Middle Ages.\footnote{Norman Cohn, \emph{The Pursuit of the
  Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the
  Middle Ages,} rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 214.}
Although his book emphasizes the religious militancy of the millenarist
Free Spirit tradition and its historical origins in the Crusades (and
what could retrospectively be called Christian European jihadism in the
Middle East), it inspired postwar countercultural movements, including
the situationists. Guy Debord refers to Cohn in \emph{The Society of
Spectacle} but rejects his critique, since for Debord, ``millenarianism,
revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the
last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency.''\footnote{Guy
  Debord, \emph{Society of The Spectacle} (Detroit, MI: Black \& Red,
  2000), 81.} Pop culture historian Greil Marcus later used Cohn's book
to construct an analogy between the millenarist Anabaptist John van
Leiden, Sex Pistols singer John Lydon, and French
situationism.\footnote{Greil Marcus, \emph{Lipstick Traces: A Secret
  History of the Twentieth Century}, new ed. (London: Picador, 1997).}

Situationist utopias, however, were materialist. They were centered on
the liberation of everyday life through play and intrinsically linked
with the expectation of a leisure society. This expectation was founded
on earlier economic and sociological theories. It conversely informed
situationist-inspired, countercultural, and left-wing anti-labor
positions from the 1970s to today. All these theories and positions
refer to automation and its predicted obsoletion of work.

Effectively, leisure society theory dates back to John Maynard Keynes,
the preeminent twentieth-century economist whose model of
counter-cyclical state intervention was widely adopted after the Great
Recession of the 1930s, and whose macroeconomics remains the best-known
counter-model to laissez-faire capitalism today. As early as in 1930,
Keynes predicted that automation would first create ``technological
unemployment,'' but eventually lead to an ``age of leisure'' with a
15-hour work week. Thus, he wrote, ``the economic problem may be solved
{[}\ldots{}{]} within one hundred years,'' and ``is not -- if we look
into the future -- the permanent problem of the human race.''\footnote{John
  Maynard Keynes, ``Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,'' in
  \emph{Essays in Persuasion} (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
  321--332.}

In French academia after the Second World War, leisure became a major
subject of social and cultural studies. Sociologist Henri Lefebvre, in
whose seminars Guy Debord participated, described leisure as a critique
of everyday life. Existing in a dialectical relation with the everyday,
leisure ``cannot be separated from work'' yet provides space for the
development of individuality outside productive labor.\footnote{Henri
  Lefebvre, \emph{Critique of Everyday Life: The Three-Volume Text}
  (London: Verso, 2014), 29--30.} For Lefebvre, ``work, leisure, family
life, and private life make up a whole which we can call a `global
structure' or `totality'.'' This totality, however, is not fixed in time
but ``historical, shifting, transitory.''\footnote{Ibid., 42.} The
situationist project might accordingly be described as an attempt to
revolutionize the totality by replacing work and other traditional
structures with play -- for example, through its ``unitary urbanism''
that reimagined cities through associative mappings and ludic
explorations, and thus amounted to the antithesis of modernist
functionalism.

Similar ideas existed in the Californian counterculture of the 1960s
where ``gurus Timothy Leary and Allan Watts maintained that nuclear
disaster was the only scenario which would prevent a full-blown leisure
society.''\footnote{Paul Clements, \emph{The Creative Underground: Art,
  Politics and Everyday Life}, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 11,
  referring to Jesse Kornbluth, \emph{Notes from the New Underground},
  1st ed. (New York: Viking Adult) 137--138.} From the 1970s to 1990s,
several prominent North American countercultural writers and
theoreticians fused countercultural anarchism and situationist theory.
In his 1985 essay \emph{The Abolition of Work}, Bob Black demanded that
``No one should ever work.''\footnote{Bob Black, \emph{The Abolition of
  Work and Other Essays} (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited,
  1986).} Black calls work ``the source of nearly all the misery in the
world'' and demands that ``{[}i{]}n order to stop suffering, we have to
stop working.'' In line with the Situationist International, he
positions play as ``just the opposite'' of work and advocates ``work
turned into play'': ``Life will become a game, or rather many games, but
not -- as it is now -- a zero-sum game.''\footnote{Ibid.}

Quite evident in these quotes is the tragic turn (or as the
situationists would have called it: the ``recuperation'' or hijacking)
of these ideas in the ``Californian Ideology'' since the 1990s, to use a
term coined by the British cultural theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy
Cameron.\footnote{Barbrook and Cameron, ``The Californian Ideology.''}
Work turned into play has become the reality or even the norm in the
``new economy'' of Internet start-ups and other companies emulating
their workplace model. This becomes visible in interior design details
like football tables in offices, but more profoundly in the
``gamification'' of work processes (such as ``code jams'' and
``hackathons'') and the blurring of office and home work, and of work
and leisure -- with the effect of never-ending work, cultural and
psychological pressure to consider one's wage work a ``project'' and
personal fulfillment in the same way as artists have blurred the lines
between their work and private life since the 1960s.

For Bob Black, automation was supposed to take care of the work that
cannot be turned into play. Unlike Keynes in the 1930s and the French
situationists of the 1960s, he explicitly refers to computer technology,
with its ``possibility of cutting way down on the little work that
remains by automating and cybernizing it.''\footnote{Black, \emph{The
  Abolition of Work and Other Essays}, 30.} Srnicek's and Williams'
contemporary vision of \emph{Inventing the Future} amounts to little
more than an elaboration of what Black had sketched in the 1980s. Their
criticism of the left-wing techno-skepticism and decentralized ``folk
politics'' corresponds to Black's endorsement of new technology, which
in its time marked a decided antithesis to fellow American anarchist,
post-situationist and countercultural theoretician John Zerzan, whose
vision for a ``freedom from work'' was that of a primitivist society
where modern technology has been given up and abundance is found in
nature.

\hypertarget{post-scarcity}{%
\section{Post-scarcity}\label{post-scarcity}}

What all these theories and manifests have in common with Keynes is
their firm assumption that scarcity -- the main issue with which
economics traditionally deals -- will soon cease to be a problem. This
idea also stood at the beginning of the Free Software movement that
created the GNU and Linux software. The \emph{GNU Manifesto} by software
developer and activist Richard Stallman appeared in 1985, the same year
as Bob Black's \emph{Abolition of Work}, and took the middle ground
between anarchist zero-work demands and Keynes's 15-hour work week:

\begin{quote}
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity
world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living.
People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun,
such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on
required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair, and
asteroid prospecting.\footnote{An in-depth discussion of Free Software
  and post-scarcity can be found in Aymeric Mansoux, ``Sandbox Culture:
  A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing
  Ideas to Art and Cultural Production'' (PhD thesis, Centre for
  Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2017), 8,
  \url{https://www.bleu255.com/~aymeric/dump/aymeric_mansoux-sandbox_culture_phd_thesis-2017.pdf}
  who also quotes this passage, (Richard M Stallman, ``The GNU
  Manifesto. Free Software Foundation.'' Free Software Foundation.
  \url{https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html}, 1985.)}
\end{quote}

Since then, this view has entered the mainstream, most prominently with
the writer and political consultant Jeremy Rifkin, who published a
technocratic vision of the \emph{End of Work} in 1995, later modified it
into a prosumer \emph{Zero Marginal Cost Society} where most goods and
services will follow an Internet model of free availability, and whose
last coinage of the \emph{Third Industrial Revolution} has been a major
influence on, among others, Germany's industry and energy politics of
the 2010s.

The educationalist Michael A. Peters usefully summarizes post-scarcity
as a discourse that spans science fiction, sociology, and digital
technologism.\footnote{Discussed in more detail in Mansoux, ``Sandbox
  Culture.'' Peters writes: ``Post-scarcity as a concept has existed for
  a while, not only in science fiction to describe economic and
  political systems where goods are freely distributed according to
  egalitarian principles but also by sociologists such as Anthony
  Giddens to point to trends in advanced industrial societies, by
  scientists who emphasize the benefits of nanotechnology with an
  abundance of raw material and self-replicating technologies and by
  digital technologists who point to zero cost in reproducing and
  sharing mass copies or to the examples of open source, open access,
  open archiving and open publishing movements,'' in: ``Introduction:
  Knowledge Goods, the Primacy of Ideas and the Economics of
  Abundance,'' in Michael A. Peters, Simon Marginson, and Peter Murphy,
  \emph{Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy} (New York: Peter
  Lang, 2009), 11.} He points out that post-scarcity demands can be
found both on the political left and the political right, with some
being anti- and others pro-capitalist.\footnote{Ibid., 12.}

This blurriness between the left and the right, and between secular
politics, political theology, and outright cultism, is particularly
evident in the \emph{Zeitgeist Movement} which rose to prominence with
the Occupy movement in 2011. Key activists and speakers of Occupy --
among others, of Occupy New York, Blockupy Frankfurt, and Occupy
Amsterdam -- were members of \emph{Zeitgeist}. The movement was created
through a series of suggestively edited feature films published on
YouTube, \emph{Zeitgeist: The Movie}; \emph{Zeitgeist: Addendum}; and
\emph{Zeitgeist: Moving Forward}, whose first installment presented a
conspiracy theory and grand historical narrative from Christianity and
institutional religion via 9/11 to the supposed elite control of the
financial system and the media.\footnote{Peter Joseph, \emph{Zeitgeist},
  2007, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1166827/; \emph{Zeitgeist:
  Addendum}, 2008, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1332128/;
  \emph{Zeitgeist: Moving Forward} (2011).
  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781069/, all accessed 05.05.2018.} Its
creator, Peter Joseph (Peter Joseph Merola), later called the films ``a
performance piece.''\footnote{``We Spoke to the `Zeitgeist' Creator
  about Trump, the Surveillance State, and Alex Jones,'' Tom Usher,
  Vice, last modified April 24, 2017,
  https://www.vice.com/en\_uk/article/ez3a74/we-spoke-to-the-zeitgeist-creator-about-trump-the-surveillance-state-and-alex-jones,
  accessed 05.05.2018.} Seeing ``post-scarcity'' as a present
possibility, \emph{Zeitgeist} advocates what it calls a ``Resource-Based
Economy'' in which a central AI computer program linked to sensors would
globally allocate resources, and exercise economic governance based on
computational objectivity. In its mission statement, \emph{Zeitgeist}
calls it ``a new socioeconomic model based upon technically responsible
Resource Management, Allocation, and Distribution through what would be
considered The Scientific Method of reasoning problems and finding
optimized solutions.''\footnote{``Mission Statement,'' The Zeitgeist
  Movement, \url{https://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/about/}, accessed
  December 03, 2017.}

While the \emph{Zeitgeist Movement} mostly identified as left-wing, it
has been called an apocalyptic Internet cult whose narrative makes use
of anti-semitic tropes.\footnote{``Brave New World: The Zeitgeist
  Movement Is the First Internet-Based Apocalyptic Cult, Centered around
  a Doomsday-Proclaiming Film and an Ideology Filled with Classic
  Anti-Semitic Tropes,'' Michelle Goldberg, \emph{Tablet Magazine --
  Jewish News and Politics}, last modified February 2, 2011,
  \url{http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/57732/brave-new-world},
  accessed 05.05.2018.} With its techno-utopia, it reciprocally
corresponded to the right-wing \emph{Neoreaction} (``NRx'') movement
that originated around the same time via the blog of the software
developer Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug). Both \emph{Zeitgeist}
and \emph{NRx} reacted to ongoing political crises, both originated in
Internet subculture and home-brew political and economic theory, both
reacted to an expected AI ``Singularity,'' only with opposite
conclusions: a global technocracy \emph{All Watched Over by Machines of
Loving Grace} (to quote poet Richard Brautigan and documentary filmmaker
Adam Curtis) in the \emph{Zeitgeist Movement} versus, in \emph{NRx}, a
right-extremist will to political power against machine rule, which
eventually made \emph{NRx} the elitist companion to the
white-nationalist populist ``Alt-Right'' movement.

If one compares \emph{Zeitgeist} to techno-eschatologies of the
seventeenth century, then it could be said to combine the Lullist vision
of formalized and automated total knowledge with macroeconomic
project-making. In seventeenth-century terminology, \emph{Zeitgeist}
thus pitches an ``Ars magna economica'' whose practical design and
implementation remains as sketchy as the Lullist Arts that Kuhlmann and
others had proposed. The idea of overcoming economic scarcity by
technological and computational means is no less speculative and
eschatological in the twenty-first century than the idea to exhaust
knowledge by computational means was in the seventeenth century. Peters
therefore is right to point out that

\begin{quote}
both left-wing and right-wing conceptions of post-scarcity may be wrong.
It is not clear that human beings, under any conceivable conditions,
have unlimited time to make decisions. {[}\ldots{}{]} It is also not
clear that time for the free play of the imagination has increased,
could markedly increase, or at least could ever be unlimited. Time is
scarce, and it grows scarcer by the day as the tempo of life increases.
As some things become freer (information notably), other things seem in
fact to be less free and more governed by necessity.\footnote{Peters,
  Marginson, and Murphy, \emph{Creativity and the Global Knowledge
  Economy}, 12.}
\end{quote}

In the light of natural resource depletion, climate change, and their
implications for large parts of the world population, this is rather
mildly phrased. The ``Californian Ideology'' seems to have been
curiously embraced by various ``post-scarcity'' movements, including
left-wing accelerationism. They believe industry promises of AI and
sustainable technology revolutions, without critical checks of their
practicability, and without analyzing these promises as what they are:
euphemistic investment sales pitches for unproven projects just like
those made by project makers in the seventeenth century. Lullists back
then and accelerationists today lack insight into crapularity as a
reality underneath ``Singularity'' prophecies.

Post-scarcity movements might share the fate of Lullism and be studied
in the future as metaphysics and eschatologies instead of what they
actually aspired to be. While the cornucopias they envisioned may not
come to fruition, they nevertheless created an abundance of imagination
and culture, from psychogeography to GNU software and pirate libraries.
They will be enjoyed, just like seventeenth century Lullism, as poetry.

\end{document}
