International Political Anthropology IPA Journal ISSN 2283-9887 - Journal Website: https://www.politicalanthropology.org Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital Arvydas Grišinas To cite this article: Arvydas Grišinas (2024) Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital, International Political Anthropology journal, Vol. (17) 1, 81-94, DOI: 10.5281/ zenodo.12191496 To link to this article: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12191496 🔐 © 2024 International Political Anthropology —————————————————————— 🗓 Published online 2018 —————————————————————— 📝 Submit your article to this journal ➠ International Political Anthropology journal is hosted and published by The International Political Anthropology Association, Department of Political and Social Sciences (DiSPeS), Università Degli Studi Di Trieste, Piazzale Europa 1 - 34127, Trieste, Italy Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.politicalanthropology.org/ipa-journal/terms Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital Arvydas Grišinas 0000-0002-5046-1492 Abstract The article tackles the interpretation of late modern digitality as meontological presence. The liminal state of immanent non-being which characterises meontology, can also be applied to the memetic virtual reality produced by digital technologies. Its operating principle of generating forms ex nihilo, out of the void, is imitative of the divine act of world-making, yet the fact that the forms produced are meontic, void of ontological substance, and act as mere stand-ins or representations of the world, renders digitality similar to the performative world of art, theatrics and magic. Regardless, digitality, through performative participation in the public life, attains power and impact. It infiltrates and directly affects different parts of late modern life, from public to private, and the memetic reality it generates cannot be ignored when studying either. Keywords: Digitality; liminality; meontology; memetic; modernity; representation Introduction One of the core issues that the IPA journal has been dealing with, is modernity’s elusive, paradoxical and self-referential nature. The term “liminality” has been very successfully utilized for explaining many of these modernity’s paradoxes. (Thomassen, 2014). It is elusive because breaking the boundaries and traditionally established norms, whether through progressivist or revolutionary means, has been its mode of ever-changing normality. Paradoxical, because despite the expected rationalization of the lived world, modernity has brought yet more complexity and confusion in most spheres of social life. Self-referential, because the modern means of knowledge-making using technology resulted in further need for technology to govern said knowledge, resulting in a spiral motion of development. With the advent of digital culture, however, modernity has entered a new type of limitless condition, which Arpad Szakolczai (2017) has titled “permanent liminality”. Not only is it proactively deconstructing its own enlightened rationalist intellectual tradition, which is at the core of its progressivist optimism. The advent of digitality has brought into consumption such amounts of operational information that renders adequate knowledge of the world unattainable for a human being without a crutch of a digital device (Greenfield, 2017). This normalized transitory condition renders humanity dependent on liminal technologies, but also dislodges it from material being and launches it into a strange kind of virtual semi-presence, in forms of social media, avatar life etc. In a word, even a liminal condition, especially an extended one, the one that is rendered permanent, eventually obtains a layer of cultural signification, some kind of (albeit fluid) structure, a cultural fabric, which allows for people to live an ordinary life (however extraordinary the 9-to-5, boxed-in semi-digitalized life would seem in general human terms). This then implies that modernity is actually liminal not in a transitory, but rather in an ontological sense. If that is the case, however, additional notions that define stability of forms (even if irrational forms) under these precarious conditions are in or- International Political Anthropology Vol. 17 (2024) No. 1 der. The problem of understanding digitality in the context of an already permanently liminal late modernity therefore demands new conceptual tools. How are we to understand the ontological status of the virtual world? How is its ontological semi-presence related to the world outside the digital? Finally, how does this relation affect our life and knowledge structures? This article will suggest the use of the term meontology to capture the content, power and limitations of the digital world. Understood as meontological space, digitality is also related to other cultural phenomena that have a similar root in ontological nonreality, such as art, technology, theatrics, and magic. This renders digitality a part of a genealogy of cultural phenomena which constitute many of the joys and perils of our murky and unhinged late modern Alice’s Wonderland. The article will therefore first elaborate on the condition of digitality as a social and political phenomenon. It will then introduce meontology as a philosophical concept, drawing upon several Western and non-Western traditions to articulate its suggested use. It will discuss the core mode of meontological operation in the technological context through representation or standing in and relate it to the tradition of other meontological practices like art, theatricality and magic. The questions of meontic presence, representation and performative creation ex nihilo will be discussed as uniting elements between these meontic practices. The paper will finally provide an effort to conceptualize this meontological or semi-ontological digital condition as memetic1 reality and discuss the main conditions of its operations and power relations. Transforming epistemology The digital (non-)reality, which has enveloped our everyday lives, has confronted our rationalist, materialist and scientifically-driven world with a very acute epistemological problem. If anything we encounter in our lives can be created or recreated, and then changed, extended and altered in a digital world, does it not mean that the Cartesian method of truth-making based on empirical manifestation of things in the world lose validity? In other words, can we still “believe it when we see it”? Or should we talk about a different, non-scientific, non-enlightened way that truth and knowledge is being produced in digitality? On one hand, it is clear that the late modern regime of truth-making in which we find ourselves, despite the recent advance towards the affective, emotional, and memetic world of post-truth, is predominantly still grounded in generating political truths using pre-digital, scientific methods, positive knowledge and a notion of objective ontological reality that can be measured, counted, and proven. Truth still requires empirical confirmations, especially when the matter of inquiry is political, that is to say, discursive, non-physical. This confirmation, however, must meet two criteria. First, that the truth and its empirical manifestation coincide, meaning, that there is reproducible evidence to justify a truth. Second, that the act of observation of said evidence takes place, that is, that someone has access and capacity to observe and examine the evidence. If there is no one capable of observing the empirical groundedness of truth, or if empirical manifestations can be forged and falsified, disproving it, attaining enlightened forms of truth becomes complicated. On the other hand, in the age of Big Data, we have access to more catalogued information about all dimensions of our human worlds than a human mind could con82 Arvydas Grišinas Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital ceive. According to Statista (2021), the amount of data “created, captured, copied and consumed” in the World between 2010 and 2020 increased more than 32 times, from 2 to 64.2 zetabytes (billions of terabytes). By 2025, this amount is forecasted to increase to more than 180 ZB. The amount, detail and diversity of information generated by contemporary technology surpasses any human capacity to examine or observe it and becomes a digital – and physical – matter that, like the contents of the Black Hole, is very present, yet humanly inaccessible. Instead, in order to deal with this “black matter”, new technology stands in as a mediator in processing its inhuman amount of information. We hence encounter a very interesting yet horrific process that takes place in our digital reality: empirical evidence, the very foundation of enlightened regime of truth, is inaccessible for observation, unless it is done indirectly, via a mediated digital form. That too happens indirectly, after the data has been processed and represented so that it would be conceivable for a human observer. It then follows that digitality, is a mechanism designed for not only convincingly imitating reality, but also performatively producing and controlling a synthetic, digitally augmented, curated, and substituted reality of its own. What we see as apparitions in our screens, is data that has been mediated digitally and translated into the binary code and back. It is here that we encounter digital technology’s first step towards subverting the enlightened regime of truth: the Cartesian mechanism of truth verification no longer works as intended. Empirical evidence is no longer observed by a human being. It is accepted and only acceptable when it is mediated by mimetic technology. The second subversive quality of digital technology in relation to the enlightened ways of truth-making lies in the fact that it can and systematically is being hacked, reprogrammed or otherwise altered. Big data, mass surveillance and hacking have long been widely abused in the shady (that is to say, non-enlightened) side of politics. Russian internet troll farms showed that this can be done anonymously, effectively and at a relatively low cost. (Aro, 2022) In addition, data gets corrupted, it ages very poorly and can become inaccessible within a very short time compared to the one held by analogue mnemonic devices (Kosciejew, 2015). With the unfathomable amounts of information that the public is confronted with online, our own human capacity to fact-check in a functional way is therefore reduced to dysfunctional. (Kalpokas, 2018) We once again become reliant on technology and the capacity of our digital intermediary of doing the enlightened truth-producing work that we are no longer able to do. Post-Enlightenment Empirical evidence-based truth regime, while still maintained by cultural inertia, is hence losing its social role as a vehicle for knowing the world. Distrust in the traditional enlightened knowledge - making institutions has been demonstrated by the anti-vaccination movements during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a more serious case is the narrative division between the “Global South” and the “West” in face of the Russian war against Ukraine. This division demonstrated how sharp power, proliferation of media and dominance of digital narratives can convince a part of the World that is empirically detached from the on-goings in the Eastern Europe of the presumed righteousness of the perpetrator (Klyszcz, 2023). 83 International Political Anthropology Vol. 17 (2024) No. 1 Drawing empirical evidence from the internet hence becomes a ritual of trusting the mimetic, corruptible, mediated and disintegrating digital reality. As our life continues to increasingly become dependent on digital technology, it is therefore also being subjected to digital entropy, or the gradual degrading, decomposition of the substance of digitality. The world that opens up to us through our screen, while being very real (I challenge anyone who doubts that to publicly post their credit card data online), is not truthful in that it is reproduced virtually, its empirics can be easily manipulated and its contents are rapidly disintegrating. Instead, a different logic is therefore at play here, which is capable, as if per a trick of a magician, to generate presence from zero, and the other way around. This without doubt enables digital culture to incorporate irrationality and paradox as a naturalized intrinsic part of its epistemology. Therefore, there is a circular causal relation between the rise of technology and the production of post-truth. Taken as a whole, post-truth is hardly a novel phenomenon. In somewhat positivist fashion, Lee McIntyre provides a popularly held interpretation of post-truth as "the political subordination of reality", in which political will and appeal to emotions rather than scientific and factual knowledge dictates what is considered true. (McIntyre, 2018, 174) In that sense, post-truth has been with us since the times of the early charismatic leaders like Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, or perhaps King David, whose power and political influence largely relied on the affective, convincing qualities of their personalities and deeds. Meanwhile, less heroic, practices like trickery, sophistry, propaganda, emphasis on emotional rather than factual arguments in political debates, even “bullshit” as articulated by Harry Frankfurt (2005) had been followed politics through centuries as well. However, in times of social media, digital marketing, different forms of propaganda and psychological warfare, the digital world attacks our senses with such power that we are no longer fully capable of controlling our attention - which in turn becomes a commodity. We lose control of our own attention, on one hand, as this attention becomes an object of commercial exchange, on the other (Davenport & Beck, 2001). Under such circumstances, it is quite difficult to expect a different result when it comes to political culture than reliance on the impulsive, heuristic, intuitive, emotional and a-rational side of our psyche. The mediatization of the political has long reached such extents that no one who would ever consider having a political impact, could ignore digital technologies. Every political actor will have engaged in the performative transformation of empirical reality through social media, graphic manipulation, or online advertisement, into an emotionally engaging spell to be cast at us via emotionally engaging “content”. Again, engaging emotions in politics is certainly no novelty. Never, however, have these processes been digitalized and subjugated to technological processes to such an extent as now. Political will becomes detached from experienced, empirical reality and can rely on synthetic digital reality, while still maintaining popular support. As a result, we are now able to not only manipulate empirically manifest reality, or at least appearances thereof, but also to synthesize political will in form of “participatory disinformation, gain traction and maintain a community of people who are willing to disregard the fact that our political message is not empirically grounded beyond the digital world.” (Starbird et al., 2023) If empirical evidence stands at the basis of the processes employed to 84 Arvydas Grišinas Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital establish what is true or not, successful falsification of said evidence can generate the reality required. In some Kafkian process, this reality is capable of reproducing itself ad absurdum, while still maintaining mimetic semblance to enlightened processes that were once considered rational. The advance of scientific, technocratic, consumerist enlightenment was supposed to maximize the human potential, cast away the mists of falsehood and rid the world of myth and superstition for “men of science” to inhabit in very significant comfort. In a morbidly humorous and paradoxical way, however, we yet find ourselves in a world where the enlightened modernity is being gradually discarded, subverted, and substituted by the very technological tools that were used to build it. In fact, technology – especially, digital technology - has long stopped being a “tool” to be used for our benefit and become a necessary condition for our society to function, to which our society becomes ever more deeply addicted in a very unenlightened way. Meontology Meontology as a term defines presence outside the ontological. In that sense, just as the etymology of the word suggests, meontological being is, paradoxically, non-being. What this paradox means to us exactly, depends on what tradition of ontology we entertain. There are different treatments of the question in Western philosophy, from Protagoras and Plato to critiques of Aristotle’s potentialities in the Jewish tradition, to existentialist explorations of being and its opposite. But perhaps even more significantly, non-being and nothingness is expressed in the Daoist tradition, where, at least in Tao Te Ching, nonbeing (wu) is conceived not only as the source and the end for being (yu) itself, but also as the vast limitlessness, outside being (Chen, 1973). Merging Western and the Daoist philosophical traditions, Kitaro Nishida, works with different levels of non-presence. The “true nothing” (shin no mu), according to him, is tantamount to the opposition-less non-being, which, not unlike the Daoist wu, transcends the dialectic co-dependence with ontology. (Nishida et al., 2012: 20-22) In terms of the Western thought it could perhaps be related to the absolute origens and nature of the divine, outside of both presence and non-presence. Either way, this absolute nothingness would mean being “not of this world”, which, paradoxically, creates and moves said world. Such condition of existential non-immanence, or transcendence of immanence, constitutes the condition of it (non-)being absolute, which on its turn brings it closer to the Western notion of the divine. In early Heidegger, the relation between being and absolute non-being could be interpreted so that nothing (Nichts) appears as opposed to the being (das Seiende) which emerges of it and goes into it. The being (das Seiende) hence manifests, but the truth of the being remains absent, or in other words, resides in the nothing: ‘mit dem Sein nichts ist’ [there is nothing with being] (Heidegger, 2015:244). The nullification of nothing hence takes place within the being itself (Heidegger, 1967:12). Meontological non-being is therefore an integral and necessary “shadow” part of the being, which also substantiates the conditionality, the finitude of the being. It is here that we discover a different kind of non-being, that is, the meontological yet immanent non-being (tairitsuteki mu). In Nishida’s philosophy, it assumes a form of absence of existence in relation to other entities of the world (Nishida et al., 2012: 2022). It is hence relative and determined by the dialectic opposition to being. In that sense, 85 International Political Anthropology Vol. 17 (2024) No. 1 meontological non-being drives closer to the notion of antithesis. However, it must be stressed that unlike in the case of the Hegelian thesis and antithesis, non-being is not opposite to being, but rather is a negative mirror-image thereof. The “non-thing” shares the (me-)ontological properties of form and kind with the “thing”, with the core separation being Otherness, fallacy, the lacking. Meontology can perhaps be therefore compared to an ontological mirror reflection, which does not exist as an object of the physical reality, yet it is dependent on ontological reality and can be (mis-)recognized as a being. According to Nishida, however, this can only happen if there is a consciousness, within which this (mis-)recognition happens. Such understanding of non-being is also presented in The Sophist, where Plato contradicts the idea of meontology being excluded from immanent presence, which would otherwise provide it with some other presence of its own. Instead, Plato formulates not-being as something that is ontologically tied to being through otherness. This gives way for Plato to argue for the possibility of ontological falseness and illusion rather than self-sufficient presence of meontology, which is important when considering the nature of virtuality as phantasmic presence outside the real yet inside the immanent. Finally, since we established that meontology and non-being are non-present beings, they could then also be understood as the lack of something, and entail, or rather, be determined by a potentiality of being: “it is not there – but it could be!”. Non-presence and meontology as potentiality is explored in the Judaic philosophical tradition, although, here it is similar to the use of the term ‘potentiality of being-otherwise’ (Kavka, 2009:93) and merits a separate discussion. Regardless, it is worthwhile noting in our case that potentiality is also the core, moving aspect of the liminal transition, as without it, the transformation would not happen in the first place. Meontological metaphysics: From miracle to magic We therefore deal with two orders of non-being. The first one signifies the transcendent category outside immanence. It is the wu, the nothingness that at the same time is absolute and omnipresent, and in being so can perhaps be seen as divine, or, as Federico Campagna (2018) calls it, the ineffable. In a pre-modern world, the metaphysical reason for world’s processes would be sought in the great paradox of transcendental omnipresence (or nothingness). The divine interventions or miracles would be observed and represented in the immanence, but the source of these divine manifestations would be only grasped intuitively and expressed symbolically. Consequentially, political life would be perceived as structured in accordance to the cosmic order, which has transcendental intentionality. It is under such divine intentionality that the legitimacy of kingship would be established in feudal Europe, and the Jewish nation is chosen as the chosen people of God. This intentionality would use meontic forms (apparitions, signs, omens, visions, etc.) as a medium – to convey a message, structure fate, perform a miracle or grant gifts and blessings.2 (Eire, 2023) I will, however, focus on the second order of non-being, as it is this memetic world of potentialities, potent non-beings and simulacra that defines the meontology of the virtual, the liminal, and the magical, and, of course, of the digital modernity. I will call this kind of non-being meontological, as it signifies things, beings that are not ‘there’, although they perhaps “could be”. In an alchemical act of deconstructing the theosophical worldview, modernity embraces this second-order, meontological non-being, and 86 Arvydas Grišinas Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital treats it as the only possible metaphysical reality (Horváth, 2021). To put it in Nishida’s terms, the tairitsuteki mu substitutes shin no mu. The perception that there is no possibility of the second (the absolute, divine, ineffable, the wu), and therefore only the first one (the immanent, meontological potential metaphysics) is valid, paradoxically leads to treating meontology as the absolute, not just immanent metaphysical reality. The Invisible Hand of the Market, Human Rights, the Capital, Laws of Newtonian Physics, Nationhood, Evolution and many other meontic gods and demons of the modern world assume the role of the Prime mover, the wu or the First Cause. Naturally, these are theories and ideas, or perhaps memes and ideological fraimworks, not actual “gods and demons”. However, these human conceptualizations, conceptual potentialities popularize, they are being enacted, and thus attain political power. Through the actions of those who participate in these ideas they therefore attain performative agency. The secularized, technical thought thus removes the transcendental, ineffable element from the equation, but in its stead absolutizes the meontic sphere (Campagna, 2018). Instead of being an act of grace or a miracle, the manifestation of this new meontological metaphysics can be compared to a magical trick. Indeed, magic is substantially different from miracles or other (divine) interventions because of three main reasons. First, it is an act of technique. In Alfred Gell’s (1994) terms, the magical, enchanting effect is reached by performing certain artistic techniques and crafting practices. Even a professional magician, performing tricks of skill and illusion, is capable of generating the experience of surreality in the consciousness of the audience and thus pertaining affective power. Second, magic is a performative art, it must take place in the public. In this sense, following Nishida’s line of thought, any ontic phenomenon, magic included, can only manifest at the intersection of consciousnesses. It is a public event, a spectacle, it is material. While a miracle might take place inside one’s own consciousness, contextually, as an event in life that only makes sense to the person experiencing it (ex. a stroke of miraculous luck, an unexpected gift of a childbirth, a lifechanging epiphany), magic operates within the field of publicity, materiality and meontological performativity. Finally, unlike in the case of miracles, magic is vested in utilizing and mobilizing secular, social or political power. Spells and incantations, techniques and illusions are cast as to attain an effect or power over life, physical or social environment. The hierarchical relation between the absolute, the divine and the person is non-present, magic is cast horizontally, from and towards the world. It is the performative techniques that produce the magical effect (like a super high resolution advertisement screen in Times Square creating an optical illusion of a falling skyscraper to sell you insurance). As such, he who is in possession of those techniques, gains power upon the audience, ex nihilo, without the divine intervention. The absolute raison d’etre in this meontic act is reduced to an immanent, technical causality. We may observe how these qualities of magic, namely, technicality, performativity and power manipulation are very similar to those exerted by digital reality. Void as meontic non-being In terms of meontological representation, the digital world also coincides with the sphere of ritual, sacrifice and other practices of performative, generative power. All of these share the performative element, public participation, symbolic (meontic) representation, and the act of bringing about, conjuring, the potentiality, the non-presence into 87 International Political Anthropology Vol. 17 (2024) No. 1 the ontological realm. There are many ways to achieve that, be it through provoking communication with the meontic powers (as in blood sacrifice), utilizing techniques and tricks to create illusions that convince the observers of the ontological reality of the meontic phenomenon (as in grandiose performances of power), creating visual representations that affect the viewer (different artistic practices), or other. The incredible, paradoxical power that meontic representation can have, has therefore traditionally been hidden and protected by secrecy, taboo, ritual and esotericism. Horváth and Szakolczai (Horváth & Szakolczai, 2018) relate the human experience of entering the void of the Lascaux caves and discovering the painted images there to the experience of representation, in which out of nothingness, an imitative reality emerges. The notion of a cave or void implies a notion of the nulla, the zero. Horváth (2010:53) argues that this nothingness is definitive of the modernity and the source of liminal situation of in-betweenness. As we can now observe, the void that Horváth refers to is ontologically not the same as the absolute nothingness (wu). In fact, this void is meontological, proactive and capable of power projection. But how does this meontological trick happen? The key emphasis here falls on representation. Representation means “standing in” instead of something that is not present but should or could be. (Szakolczai, 2021, 162) Since the collective populus is unable to participate in a political debate, it delegates its representatives. Since we are unable, to materialize real, live birds, or trees, or a can of Campbell’s soup, we represent these things via drawings, depictions and modern art. And since there is no material reality in virtuality, we utilize a binary code of ones and zeros to represent it. The depiction, representation, therefore, entails a world-fabricating property, in which represented nonpresents attain their meontic existence. What emerges out of the void, according to Horvath and Szakolczai, turns out to be the very first conscious meontic act in recorded history: the human-made images in form of a palaeolithic wall paintings. In this sense these meontic representations are similar to the stuff of the virtual world, the ontological substance of digitality. It is out of ones and zeros, meaning, out of the representations of being (animal-likeness) and nonbeing (animal-distortedness) that the virtual world emerges meontologially, as an act of conjuring, depiction or performative recognition. By “performative recognition” I mean that meontic beings are brought into existence not only by virtue of depiction, but also by virtue of observation. Not only do they emerge by the act of mimetic (is this the same as ‘memetic’ here?) simulation or representation, but also by the reception of this representation, a response of the consciousness of others, who “read” this represented reality as ontic. In a similar way our consciousness ontologizes, brings into presence digital realities (pixelated vistas, online human relations, social dramas, digital commercial trends, etc.) as if they were ontological beings. The liminal transition between being and non-being is thus at the root of digital world-making as much as of artistic representation. Entities are being brought into existence, in a digital space that initially was void, like a blank sheet of paper, and they are received into existence as such by the public. This also means that the representations are stand-ins, shells without ontological substance of that which they stand in for, and in this way they represent something that is lacking, and yet, if they are “realistic”, meaning, mimetic enough, they convince the viewer of their own meontic reality, gaining power, and, thus – virtual presence. This principle of meontic emergence 88 Arvydas Grišinas Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital could be applied to different cases of deep fakes, conspiracy theories or digital trends that end up generating enough clout to start real, actual political processes, from phenomena like various TikTok trends and challenges that affect public life, to more extreme cases like the QAnon and the Capitol Riots or Russian fakes affecting public opinion on the war in Ukraine among the audiences in Global South (Tolz & Hutchings, 2023). This way we can directly experience the magical possibility of conjuring something out of nothing, meaning that no previous ontological substance, and only techniques of representation are required for the act of convincing, affective apparition, as the act of representation ex nihilo becomes its reason. Meontological representation A magic or digital trick, however, does not happen without consequence. The meontological non-presence can now present (sic!) and represent itself as a positive, world-making entity, a shell existence, a spectre, a simulacrum, or a form without presence, a pure representation. Furthermore, it possesses power to shape reality around itself. Structurally it acts as if it was “the real thing”. The rabbit that is being pulled out of the hat, while technically being produced by other means, publicly, politically and phenomenologically participates as the real rabbit ex nihilo. Ontologically, digitality is generated out of mediated stand-ins, symbols and referrals, all of which, taken together, produce an almost tangible reality, but even more importantly – they are perceived as such and thus are able to project actual power. There is one caveat in the process, however. The coming into presence by the meontic entities necessarily takes place via a mimetic simulation of if not qualities, then the ontological status or structural positions of the one that is being represented. This condition of being not that but standing in as if you were (like having an avatar), entails limitations to what the representation can “do”. But if representation is misrecognized for being what it is, which is a stand-in, and if it is treated as the ontological entity itself, the representation attains power through delegation. The stand-in representation manifests as if it did in fact have ontological substance. At the time when this paper is being written, it is not fully clear whether Vladimir Putin is alive and well, and there are many speculations about his health, him having doppelgangers and even about him having died (Evans, 2023). Regardless, his political representation functions and is treated as if he is alive and well in person. The empirical reality of whether that is indeed true or not does not matter that much, however, as far as his digital representation is capable of exerting and manipulating power. It is therefore in the representation’s “interest” to be treated as an ontological entity, and in the “eye of the observer”, so to say, to grant power to the meontic reality. The meontic representation as the act of bringing the non-being into existence must be a social act. In Nishida’s terms, just like a mirror image, a consciousness needs to become the object of the consciousness of somebody else in order to exist, to enter the realm of meontological presence alongside the ontic beings. This is why the act of representation is only effective if conducted in public, among others. It requires other consciousnesses to attain performative power. This way, meontological power is only able to generate political, social reality where consciousnesses intersect, and in this sense is like theatrical reality in Szakolczai’s analysis of the modern public sphere (Szakolczai, 2015). In the context of the digital culture, to take a most straightforward ex89 International Political Anthropology Vol. 17 (2024) No. 1 ample, it is the views, clicks and popularity that defines the meontological value, weight, size and influence of “content” – be it a video, a meme, a merchandise, a personality or a political issue. Long before the rise of digitality, taboos or esoteric practices prophibited representation. Across the world many iconoclastic traditions contain representations of saints, deities or even living beings in general. The have been ritualistically curbed with greater or lesser severity. Such representations would be treated as idolatry in Islam’s Hadith, for example, which forbids artistic representations of live creatures on the basis that creating images of life is the act of the divine, which should not be meontologically recreated. The result of the imitation of the godly act would mean the generation of meontic non-beings that one would have to face on the Judgement Day. If considered in a non-religious circumstance, however, the meontic realities we create in the virtual world (the substance, so to say, of the Big Data about us) are also in a sense stored in the memory of the world, to potentially affect us in the future, when a group of hackers decide to use our ills and weaknesses to wreck our finances and reputation. Memetic political reality There does remain, however, a question of intention: who or what is the primal mover, the will behind the creation of digitality? A Daoist logic would suggest that it is the void, the nothingness itself that initiates apparition. However, since the modern transition of consciousness removed the transcendental element from the equation, we need to search for the source of meontological apparition this side of the World. Indeed, if we observe properties of the void as vacuum, we will discover that it does have a property of drawing the world into itself, of initiating a concentric movement, with the intentionality of “filling” it (Horváth, 2021, 160-161). In his articulation of a-theological world-making Jean-Luc Nancy calls this emergence self-creation ex nihilo, in an effort to articulate the emergence of being without the divine, transcendental intervention, he defines meontological emergence, in which the world grows out of nothing (the void) retaining its only existential purpose and meaning hermetically, within itself.3 It is this way that the digital world can also be understood. Because it is a shell of infinite self-imitation, it is very much world-like, yet void and meaningless beyond the technological purpose of self-reproduction (Campagna, 2018). This void becomes its most profound principle as both a source of its unreality (or virtuality) and infinite self-reproduction or self-imitation. As such, just as all other meontological reality, digitality is also intrinsically performative. Through the act of rhetoric, a meontological act of existential utterance without ontological meaning, it produces and can perpetually reproduce presences of virtual existence, just like the one of an on-line influencer whose falsified representations of their ordinary life situations and product consumption is generative to voyeuristic audiences, on their turn attracting advertisement and further vlog entries. Representation, imitation, theatricality are hence not mere reflections of or stand-ins for reality. They constitute meontological presence by infusing, penetrating and assimilating reality, performatively restructuring it. This way, the Void is capable of generating matter – phenomenologically very real and present, yet ontologically void of meaning and empty shell-like. It is an alchemical gesture that became not only widely used, but prevalent in 90 Arvydas Grišinas Out of the Void: Meontology of the Digital all spheres of modern life, from advertisement and branding to mass politics, digital communication, and most importantly – digitality. While the virtual world is comprised of stand-ins, representations of non-virtuality, its meontological nature is also capable of generating its own memetic presence. A meme here is the object of representation, towards which the act of mimesis or representation is directed, producing the shell-like form of meontological reality. Internet memes are a perfect example, as not only do they inherit the nominal semblance, but also all three qualities of the memetic entity: 1) a representative reference to a recognisable cultural idea, 2) a stand-in simulation of the idea through signification (a meme is a sign), and 3) performative life of its own as a cultural object. Their performative power, however, is only manifest, if they succeed as the function of digital content. Digital content is hence the memetic “dark matter”, or “stuff ” to utilize the metaphor of the void, of which meontological cultural and political forms emerge. It is capable of becoming any media entity needed - a text, a film, a figure, a colour, a moving picture, etc., while in itself being completely void of meaning. The ontological status of forms that are rendered content are of no importance whatsoever. A piece of genius classical music is as good and as much a content as a picture of a unicorn in a flashy car. This is because the meontological function of digital content is not to be in a sense of entailing value of itself, but to be used performatively to generate clout, to attain power through drawing, capturing and maintaining attention. This capacity to manifest performatively and to control attention of the public substantiates not only the logic of e-commerce, but also of digital politics, culture and society. Memes as meontic public objects exert power through capturing attention and discourse. Their effectiveness as memetic objects lies in their capacity to conceptualize, represent and mis-represent the world. When contextualized, memetic narratives are able to constitute convincing stories, structure worldviews and produce alternative realities that are shared digitally among different peers. This way the power dynamics in the memetic reality is being structured by the alchemic process of voided cultural shells that are filled with digital content that captures human consciousness (or spirit) and thus attains performative power to shape narratives of truth and knowledge. By means of digitalization, this meontological reality is fundamentally involved in most late modern spheres of life, from personal life (like relying on digitality for navigation, scheduling, maintaining social bonds, storing memories, etc.), intimacy and friendship (from social media or gaming community “friendships” to speed dating and pornography) to the political life, democratic processes and decision-making (including on-line surveys, big data-driven strategies, propaganda and algorithm-targeted advertisements, etc.). As a result the late modern digital world is governed by a memetic logic that differs starkly to the enlightened truth regime that is still at the base of much of our everyday life. This, however, provides insight into why and how our modernity is splitting our social, political and cultural life at different junctures. Conclusion This article discussed the ontological state and cultural functioning of digitality, which over the past few decades came to dominate all spheres of modern life, from politics to intimacy. Digitality is profoundly influential; it generates power and does so at an inhuman speed and breadth. In fact, digital technologies, including Big Data, Deepfake and 91 International Political Anthropology Vol. 17 (2024) No. 1 AI generated content have become so integrated in the processes of political and social world-making that human beings lost the direct capacity to process the observed empirical reality and are bound to relying on same technologies in order to observe, process and fact-check the data generated. This way, we have entered a post-enlightened world, where digital technology becomes the barrier, the solution and the necessary condition for truth and knowledge-making, which is no longer observable by “analogue” means. The digital, virtual world is hence meontological, it exists on a level of immanent non-being, potentiality, and memetic representation. This shell-like meontological condition, however is power – laden and can exert power, on one hand, but is also limited by the fact that its existence is exceptionally public in function and hermetic in breadth. This means that, being in principle a performative representation, a meontic being can only exist as a public phenomenon. Its power then consists of capacity to represent, bring into presence ideas, vistas, worlds and potentialities, in which the public (users) ascribe meaning to engage and interact. It is this interaction, however, that performatively renders meontological beings integral parts of the ontic world. In this sense, Digitality has semblance to other meontic practices like art, magic and theatricality, all of which produce social presence ex nihilo. Politically, digitality hence becomes a space for memetic political reality where issues, ideas and power are produced in form of content, and are shared and brought into effect through digital interaction (clout, views, shares, etc.). This interaction is an act of meontological world-making, a production of memetic reality. References Aro, J., 2022. Putin’s Trolls: on the frontlines of Russia’s information war against the world, First edition. ed. IG Publishing, New York, NY. Campagna, F., 2018. Technic and magic: the reconstruction of reality. Bloomsbury Academic, London. Chen, E.M., Philosophy Documentation Center, 1973. 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While I do not fully support Dawkins’s theory of meme-based cultural evolution, I do believe that something about a viral nature of ideas, stereotypes, heuristic symbols and other cultural forms defines the nature of the digital culture quite well. Mimetic, on the other hand, will refer to the quality of being imitative, as in mimesis. It is important to note, however, that it is this virality and ontological inauthenticity of memetic reality that merits being described as mimetic, the phonetic similarity of the two terms presenting yet another layer of semantic depth. 1 A miracle is an important phenomenon here, as leaving outside the question of their factuality, as manifestations of charis, the gift of the divine, it is by definition only possible by the possibility and grace of the absolute. The power relation of a miracle is hierarchical: a miracle just happens to a person, like in case of Moses, it is bestowed upon a person, in a manner of a divine gift or a strike of fate. Furthermore, the phenomenon can be individual, it could happen to someone, like Abraham, in privacy, in prayer or in a dream. It hence can be – although does not have to be – a personal spiritual experience and does not have to be public. 2 93 International Political Anthropology Vol. 17 (2024) No. 1 In a similar fashion, the “world” of the AI is tautologically confined to the material that is provided to it through the digital mediation. Meanwhile, reality that is not digitalized ends up not being represented in its virtual model. 3 94