Vacua Vita
Joseph Randolph
Non-Fiction - Philosophy, Culture, Aesthetics
767 pgs.
2024
Hardcover
PDF available on request. Email josephrandolphart [at] gmail.com.
VACUA VITA is a long-form philosophical study of contemporary interpretive conditions: the operative rules by which persons and institutions generate readings, issue evaluations, and stabilize meaning under excessive throughput. The first movement models interpretation as procedure: repeatable moves (selection, framing, suspicion, moral indexing, status signaling) executed within attention markets and platform-mediated discourse, where visibility, outrage, and legibility function as selection pressures on judgment. Across essays on envy, rivalry, exhaustion, labor, ecology, trauma, digital immortality, necropolitics, algorithmic governance, mimetic dynamics, networked life, and related domains, the opening section performs an immanent, dialectical analysis by running governing logics from inside—treating incentives, constraints, and reward structures as causal variables shaping what counts as insight, relevance, and truth in practice.
The second movement gathers essays approaching the contemporary crisis of meaning from adjoining fronts: formal, cognitive-scientific, technological, theological, and poetic. One essay begins from semantic paradox and incompleteness (Yablo’s paradox, Tarskian undefinability, Gödelian limits, Derridean deferral), clarifying how truth-conditions and semantic grounding resist self-stabilization, and why apophatic traditions remain philosophically serious under logical constraint. Another reframes cultural and media theory in the technical grammar of predictive processing and active inference, translating Stiegler and Simondon into analyses of hypermassified temporal environments, population-level prior alignment, infrastructural inference, and algorithmic governance, where industrial and platform systems configure attention, desire, and action by shaping environmental and mnemonic conditions. A third locates discourse where legibility becomes obligation, where speech enters in advance under criteria it did not choose. Reading Iblis and Māra through Foucault and Gnostic inversion, and tracing this limit-line through Celan, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, it frames poetry as a deliberate overloading of those criteria, pressing intelligibility to the point where the sublime no longer names elevation, but the coincidence of expression with its own breakdown. Across these essays, the sacred appears as constraint rather than doctrine: regimes of deep commitment, temporal protection, and zones of withdrawal that preserve plural forms of life against totalizing systems of optimization and interpretive control.
The final movement argues that literature is the last domain where time can still be built rather than consumed. It treats poetic and narrative composition as technologies for constructing temporal experience itself—sentence-durations, rhythmic constraints, and formal architectures that stage consciousness as process rather than datum. At the same time, it maps how contemporary media ecologies—platform circulation, attention metrics, institutional craft regimes, accessibility mandates—pressure literary form toward instant legibility, content extraction, and affective immediacy, compressing reading into another interface. Against this field, the section reframes modernist difficulty as an ethics of temporal resistance: commitment to forms that refuse acceleration, refuse frictionless access, and reassert language’s capacity to hold experience open. Readings of Joyce, Pound, Zukofsky, H.D., Trakl, Dickinson, Whitman, Faulkner, Rimbaud, Pessoa, the realist–modernist inheritance, and more, develop a theory of literary labor under commodified circulation, where autonomy persists as risk, precarity, and deliberate unmarketability. Across these essays, literature appears as an engineered attentional ordeal: a designed expenditure of time through which meaning is undergone rather than delivered.
For readers of Simone Weil, Byung-Chul Han, René Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, and the late Michel Foucault, VITA delivers a structural reckoning that rejects compliance, demands attention, and offers, in place of consolation, a rarer gift: clarity with courage.
