Singularity
Chopping up the world tree and setting it on fire
In one of the most stirring crescendos of classical music, in the last scene of Twilight of the Gods, at the end of Wagner’s four-opera epic The Ring of the Nibelung, Brünnhilde, daughter of Wotan, jumps on the funeral pyre of her beloved Siegfried, who was betrayed and killed by the scheming dwarf Hagen and his human allies. In a “realist” opera such as Verdi’s The Troubadour, also featuring a pyre (or rather stake) as a central plot device, someone dying in the flames has no metaphysical ramifications. The person dies, another perhaps shrieks or laughs, the fire burns down and the opera ends on a minor chord in the low brass.
However, Brünnhilde burning is no verist moment—her jumping in the fire ends the world. In her final pronouncement, she instructs ravens to send the trickster-god Loge (known as Loki in Scandinavian mythology) to take the flames to Valhalla, the fortress of the gods, and set it on flames. It can be set on flames so easily because Wotan (Odin), the Jovean arch-god is so dissatisfied with the world of broken contracts he’d built that prior to the start of the final opera he’d chopped down the world-ash-tree and had turned it into the funeral pyre of the entire cosmos.
The pivotal act of a single person, in a great moment of significance, met with the necessary groundwork laid by others, sets the world on fire, collapsing also any human structures, including the fortifications along the river Rhine which spreads across the land and puts out the flames, leaving us where we began four operas earlier1.
In one scene of the 2023 film Oppenheimer, we see a fictionalised moment from the ‘golden age of physics’. In a seminar room populated by postgraduate theoretical physicians, someone proposes the idea of the black hole as a region of space-time where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. At the centre of such object would be a ‘singularity’, which the encyclopedia describes as
“a condition in which gravity is predicted to be so intense that spacetime itself would break down catastrophically. As such, a singularity is by definition no longer part of the regular spacetime and cannot be determined by "where" or "when".”
Time and space break down, lose all meaning—a trap, in the case of a black hole, but a moment of liberation for Brünnhilde and for Wotan, whose obscure and roundabout plan for destroying the world comes to fruition. The singularity-character of Brünnhilde’s pyre is manifest in the elegance with which a decisive act (on the face of it only significant on the scale of the individual) brings down the entire universe. In the Singularity actions of individuals become grander and infinitely more powerful than actions of gods, of leagues of valkyries, of giants (turned dragon), of dwarven slave armies or of prophesised heroes born of incest—the forces and agents who populated and struggled bitterly over the world.
Singularity is a moment when the realities of “where” and “when” no longer protect us from involvement. It is an imposing necessity, a collapsing of story (or history) and space (geography) on itself. Time, like distance, is no barrier when the final Dämmerung arrives.
To the viewer of the opera this experience is cathartic. The Leitmotiv of the end of the gods is a gently falling, beautifully harmonised scale. Note that there are no gods in The Twilight of the Gods (if you discount the Norns in the prologue and Brünnhilde herself). There are only individuals engaged in an involved drama of forgetting-potions and shape-shifting-helmets and stag hunts. The many sprawling episodes of the Musikdrama pile onto each other with the predictability of an Italian comic opera, with the forced and overdone trope of “lover not recognising her love because he wears different clothes ha-ha”.
And then suddenly the world ends.
Over the last decade a growing number of voices alert us to a coming “technological singularity”, a moment when computerised systems become so adept at accomplishing tasks that suddenly and irreversibly the whole world becomes their playing field. Capitalism leaves no one alone, but for now it is easy enough to escape particular aspects of the crisis of modern society by going somewhere else, doing something else, or simply not looking. Not so in the Singularity. For a machinic system that can 1) engineer the genetic code of deadly viruses2, 2) create swarms of self-replicating robots using novel materials3, and 3) can reproduce human language4, it only takes a few gullible or careless humans to destroy the world. No tales are told of genies who fulfil wishes unproblematically.
Society engineers cooperation amongst humans in ways that produce historically unfathomable riches and opportunities. And it also chops down the world-ash-tree and arranges it neatly in the shape of a pyre. The newest generation of AI received the hopelessly unimaginative name of “transformer”. Perhaps they should be called “Valkyrie”.
Circumstances tie the world together and enable a pivotal action with unescapable consequences. This is the pattern in Wagner, and this is the pattern of the desire-fear of Artificial Intelligence. At a certain point in history, the desire for Singularity coincides with the desire for revolution. Marx writes in Class Struggles in France about the way succeeding forms of proletarian political action set the funeral pyre of capitalism, waiting for a single pivotal act of revolution to lead by necessity to a world-transforming chain of events.
Firstly, he describes the continent’s economic dependence on England:
“Just as the period of crisis occurs later on the Continent than in England, so does that of prosperity. The original process always takes place in England; it is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos.”
England’s success depends on her performance on the world market, which enables her to purchase the products of European industry. If a crisis is on the way, Europe is hurt first as demand for its exports dry up.
“Violent outbreaks must naturally occur rather in the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, since the possibility of adjustment is greater here than there.”
Once that crisis breaks out, Marx contends, a revolution can break out in France that can turn into the final revolution. Why? Because all the European powers allied each other in the Holy Alliance to defeat a revolution.
“Finally, with the victories of the Holy Alliance, Europe has taken on a form that makes every fresh proletarian upheaval in France directly coincide with a world war. The new French revolution is forced to leave its national soil forthwith and conquer the European terrain, on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be accomplished.
“Thus only [proletarian] defeat has created all the conditions under which France can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only after being dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricolour become the flag of the European revolution—the red flag!
“And we exclaim: The revolution is dead!—Long live the revolution!” [emphasis in the original]
He writes in a time of lull in the international class struggle, when his activist organisation is tiny and seemingly irrelevant. And yet the model of the Singularity enables him to chart a path and an understanding that allows precisely this tiny and irrelevant organisation, allied with the international body of the proletariat, in a pivotal moment and with a pivotal act, to change the world at once.
The desire for the Singularity is the desire for a singular unitary event where history, space, place and scale collapse, and finally a single action is enough to set the world ablaze—apart from space and time it can encompass and shape the cosmos. The fear of the Singularity, on the other hand, reflects the possibility that we might not be Brünnhilde or Wotan, but the Gibichung bystanders swept away by the Rhine; or the idiot Hagen leaping into his death to reclaim the ring.
Or so Wagner writes in the score—but some directors prefer to see the masses of ordinary humans inheriting the Earth (Boulez-Chéreau’s classic centenary Bayeruth performance of a New Left flavour), or (a common trope in more recent performances) a beautiful death of humanity and a reclamation by Nature (I witnessed a particularly unappealing version of this in Budapest in November 2022).
Already accomplished.
Still controversial but plausible.
Already accomplished.