The articulation of the nature of The Ark Work and Eschatology are essentially the same thing. Eschatology has to do the work of defending the right to ask the question: what should come after human kind? The Ark Work works in the name of the proposed answer to this question
DETERMINATION IN THE LAST INSTANCE
When people on the left use the term "materialism", they can mean many different things - but one important resonance is the Marxist one: the thesis that ideas circulating in the social field are 'determined in the last instance' by relations of production. In other words, norms, ideals, imperatives, identities and so on are ideological - they mystify the populace and serve the end of profit. So "matter" - the self-reproduction of capital - is prior to "thought" - ideology.
This notion can be (and has been) expanded to include not just positive beliefs and convictions (say in a particular religious doctrine or in bourgeoise liberal humanitarianism), but our very phenomenological horizon, the limits of what can be felt, conceived, experienced as given in even the most inchoate, ineffable way. This expansion represents both a radicalization of capital's power over human life and a radicalization within the philosophical tradition. It really is the case, if you think about it, that one's very drives, desires, presuppositions, habits of nutrition and so forth are mediated by the profit machine.
The argument goes that this includes, and perhaps especially includes, the experience of being free. Self-expression and affirmation of otherness on Instragram, for example, refreshing likes while transgressing norms, would in this theory be something like crown jewel of capitalist domination of hearts and minds.
I think it is here that there is a deadlock between philosophy's contemporary emancipatory horizon and those of both fine art and underground music. In art and music, social media has been accepted wholesale as a valid mode of promotion and medium for artistic practice itself, and there is no hotter topic that affirmation of polymorphous cultural, gender and sexual norms.
A sincere materialist philosopher doesn't quite know what to do with this - Zizek's many recent gaffes about gender identity are emblematic of this. For him, public focus on LGBT rights is a sort of regrettable "political correctness", a manifestation of Nietzsche's "last man" who withers away, unable to make subjectively embodied choices, or Hegel's "beautiful soul", railing emotionally against a system with which she is basically complicit in her lifestyle.
There is something to this critique, which I think in one way or another we all felt upon the election of trump: realizing we had been merely spouting cute, curated views in a Facebook echo chamber and so forth while doing little or nothing to actually engage (even discursively) the actual core antagonism of our time. On the other hand, there is something to the obvious critique of the privileged white male who associates the struggle for, say, transgender rights or respect towards cultural heritage with a sort of needlessly permissive / PC outlook, while continuing to go on enjoying his privileged white male status.
I guess what I mean is that a lot could be done to define exactly what it is we are still hoping to save from the tentacles of 'world-capitalism'. In a way the answer is obvious: it is always egalitarianism, the equal opportunity for all to live, work and express autonomously. But the arts are tragically far away from being coordinated with respect to actually enacting this.
A GOAL
It is obvious that human kind needs a solution, but part of the problem is that it is so difficult to think creatively about the nature of this solution or the terms in which it would be defined.
Promethean messianism posits that the solution must be the greatest possible rational desire...not -inconceivable-, like the heaven of the medievals, but -difficult- to conceive.
And the difficulty is not just intellectual, it is also libidinal: we are ashamed to conceive it. We cannot bear to, it seems absurd and disgusting, because our sense of self is ruled by a shame that outlines our sense of what is disgusting, riduclous, passé, pretentious. We foreclose its conception in the name of a sort of frightened sense of honor.
THE ABSOLUTE
Messianism is concerned with genetic engineering, to a degree. If there is ever to be a decisive shift that puts the human condition to an end, manipulation of genes is likely to play a role - indefinitely extending life span, using DNA samples to resurrect the dead and so on.
The question to consider is the boundary, as regards desire, between the absolute and the merely biological. Humans are innately predisposed to yearn for eye contact, facial recognition and affective attunement - and likewise innately predisposed to seek new horizons. Evolution is a possible explanation for these predispositions, but it may not explain all of them (and we are not able to test the theory, so we don't know). It could well be that one of these innate dispositions is genetic - that is, merely genetic - while the other is a sort of logical, cybernetic byproduct of being an information processing machine (a mind).
At the very least, the cosmic low-level randomness that the theory of evolution depends on (needed for the random mutations that take place between generations) cannot itself be explained by evolution. We can either see it as a will to power, driving species to expand and change, with Nietzsche, or - though though the difference might only be rhetorical - we can imagine that this randomness is a sort of purely mathematical excess.
A major task for thought, then - strangely sci-fi, but totally contemporary and urgent - is to find a criterion for preserving or discarding different parts of the genome. This criterion would presumably have something to do with that which turns out to be cosmic (material) in our nature, rather than merely biological - whatever that turns out to be.
If we could erase the biological predisposition for attachment, the very basis for the human condition at the root of psychoanalysis, should we?
PROMETHEAN MESSIANISM
Prometheanism and messianism are generally opposed as incompatible attitudes. While messianism would be an awaiting for an advent which we do not have the power to catalyze or even perhaps conceive of, prometheanism takes on the power and responsibility of creating this outcome.
The choice of one of these options of the the other (assuming one has any attitude at all towards this question) hinges on one's attitude towards reason. One either has faith in reason's power to, if used properly, satisfy all desires and put injustice to an end, or one believes that over-emphasis on reason is a self-destructive hubris, gesturing towards World War II as its culmination. Messianism is more mysterious - at its minimum, though, it requires a non-human agency. It requires a response.
The two, however, are in fact compatible - and neither alone is sufficient. In short - reason alone, as we currently understand it, is not enough. What is required is an experimental coordination between reason, drama and music - a society-wide effort to allow new forms and affects to proliferate in the name of egalitarian self-transformation. Many of these enterprises may fail, but ultimately the outcome has to be a response, a moment of grace.
THE NAME
In the name of what? Let me quickly gloss eschatology once more. It feels like one needs to fight for the right to name eschatology as a legitimate category of thought. Of course, eschatology is legitimate in monotheist thought (Christian, Jewish, Muslim). While I'm interested in these threads of human culture, I think that the damage done to their presuppositions by the rise of the scientific image is decisive. Nevertheless, much like the cosmogonical question, eschatology persists. The most legitimized way to think of a decisive (and perhaps glorious) end to human history is in terms of some kind of post-human era. We upload our consciousnesses or we generate photosynthetic immortal bodies for ourselves and all the dead whose genomes we can access. What I'm most concerned with on the topic of eschatology is the implied punctuation mark of desire. There is a virtual endpoint to activity - satisfaction is almost always in the name of a relative means to a greater end. Anyway, there is a space for eschatology which is neither the dogma of a particular religion nor the secularized tragic poetry of the WWII era. Much like the cosmogonical case - basic awareness of the eschatological dimension is itself a huge step
RATIONALITY AND ADVENT
What is advent? Advent is a dimension of the future that is ordinarily foreclosed to both wider culture and to thought. It can be argued that the possibility of advent is rational - that it is indeed the peak of rationality. Given what we know about the real and the nature of desire, we can say that the most rational desire is a desire for advent. But human beings have a tendency to swim in a murky para-reason, using reason to get to a certain point, but then at that point abandoning it (traditionally the sages and philosophers identify this point with honor, wealth, power). I'm just briefly and casually glossing this topic right now, but I will return to it. The main resources for constructing an idea of rational advent are Meillassioux, Moltmann and Rosenzweig.
What to say about the shame associated with messianism? Painting with the broadest of brush strokes, we can say that it is an effect of the same suture, the same ARMISTICE that forecloses speculation about cosmogony - which is to say that it amounts to ideology. The ideology of the VORIZENIC ARMISTICE is an inhibition of the imagination via a subtle shaming of the effort to join reason and the divine that thwarts freedom, wisdom and power: no cosmogony, no eschatology