|||| Gunk (mereology) ...any whole whose parts all have further proper parts. That is, a gunky object is not made of indivisible atoms or simples. Because parthood is transitive, any part of gunk is itself gunk. 1 Nihilism is either necessarily true, or necessarily false. 2 Gunk is metaphysically possible. 3 If gunk is metaphysically possible, the nihilism is not necessarily true. 4 Therefore, nihilism is necessarily false. |||| | dkmu.org In the society of failure, there is no Art and no one willing to create it. Art excites and Art ignites. Art inspires something more in the gut of a person other than the desire to spend money. Art causes wars and it also breaks them. Art speaks of love and hate in the same way it does of one dream to another. Everything is beautifully revolting, and equally nonsensical. The Artist creates a pastel moon garden at the edge of his own black hole. | dkmu.org | ajnr.org/content/33/3/393 It is interesting to think that it may actually be easier to attain intellectual Singularity than corporal Singularity. Although we know the structure of the human genome, understanding how it works and how to alter its workings favorably may not be feasible in the foreseeable future. For many transhumanists, intellectual Singularity may be as close as 45–50 years away, and it will serve as the gateway to corporal Singularity.6 The only thing between unlimited human progress and the way we are now is, paradoxically, our brain and its apparently limited capacity (contained as it is in the cranial bones, it cannot develop more volume and accommodate more than the already present 100 billion neurons and its 100 trillion connections). Through amplification of our native intelligence and/or the addition of artificial intelligence, Singularity can take place and progress becomes fast and unlimited. Unleashed, these “human machines” will work to create new and more powerful, perfect ones. | ajnr.org/content/33/3/393 | New Materialism, Nick J Fox and Pam Alldred This distinctive ontology has been described as ‘flat’ or ‘monist’ (rather than ‘dualist’), rejecting differences between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ realms, human and non-human, structure/agency, reason/emotion, animate/inanimate and – perhaps most significantly – between mind and matter (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010). Paradoxically, however, this flat ontology is not a move to universalism or a unitary perspective upon the social or upon subjectivity, but rather opens up a multiplicity and diversity that exceeds and overwhelms the dichotomies they replace (Braidotti, 2011: 211). Multiplicity is acknowledged variously throughout new materialist thought: in DeleuzoGuattarian notions of rhizome, nomadology and becoming; in Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology (2007: 90); in Mol’s (2002) body-multiple; and in Braidotti’s (2011: 211) nomadic subject. A flat ontology also marks a re-focusing of attention away from hierarchies, systems or structures beyond or beneath the surface of everyday activities and interactions. In new materialist ontology there are no structures, systems or mechanisms at work; instead there are ‘events’ – an endless cascade of events comprising the material effects of both nature and culture that together produce the world and human history. Exploring the relational character of these events and their physical, biological and expressive composition becomes the means for social science to explain the continuities, fluxes and ‘becomings’ that produce the world around us, rather than via structural or systemic ‘explanations’ of how societies and cultures work (Latour, 2005: 130). This has implications for research, requiring a focus upon the specific inter-actions that occur within events. According to their advocates, the new materialisms afford a variety of theoretical and practical opportunities. First, they reject the boundary dispute between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ sciences, questioning the very separation between nature and culture (Braidotti, 2013; Latour, 2005: 13). Instead, they link the production of the world and everything ‘social’ and ‘natural’ within it to a wide variety of forces, from physical interactions to biological processes to social encounters and emotional reactions. By drawing nature and culture, mind and matter into a single arena, new materialisms radically extend the scope of materialist analysis beyond traditional concerns with structural and ‘macro’ level social phenomena (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 159). Issues which have often been regarded as experiential or individual – such as creativity and sexuality – may also be studied materially, acknowledging that thoughts, abstract concepts, memories, desires and feelings also materially contribute to social production (DeLanda, 2006; 5). Second, new materialists regard the material world and its contents not as fixed, stable entities, but as relational and uneven, emerging in unpredictable ways around actions and events, ‘in a kind of chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual connections, always in flux, always reassembling in different ways’ (Potts, 2004: 19). Whereas critical realists have conceived of a world of hierarchical and stratified structures, things, and essences, new materialists such as Deleuze address a complex, dynamic, and open world founded on difference, heterogeneity, and emergence. For new materialists, human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities have no ontological status or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas. Third, the relationality of the world is in part operationalized via an understanding of agency that no longer privileges human action. Rather, a ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 127-128) is a feature of all matter: human and non-human, animate and inanimate. This establishes a perspective upon the world as continuously emergent via a series of interactive and productive events/assemblages, rather than founded upon stable structures or systems. De-privileging human agency also serves as an ethical and political counter to the humanism of the social sciences, supplying the basis both for an anti-humanist critique of the environmentally-destructive capacities of humans, but also to re-integrate humans within ‘the environment’ (Fox and Alldred, 2017a: 42). This latter move underpins a more positive posthumanism, which can be a basis for an eco-philosophy that establishes a continuum between human and non-human matter (Braidotti, 2013: 104). Fourth, many of the leading new materialist scholars – notably feminists, post-colonial scholars and queer theorists – have developed or adopted these perspectives of their social and politically engagements; finding in the new materialisms a framework that is materially embedded and embodied (Braidotti, 2011: 128) and can be used both to research the social world and to seek to change it for the better. While post-structuralism and social constructionism provided a means to break through top-down, determinist theories of power and social structure, the focus upon textuality, discourses and systems of thought in these approaches tended to create distance between theory and practice, and gave the sense that radical, interventionist critiques of inequities and oppressions were merely further constructions of the social world. The turn to matter offers a re-immersion in the materiality of life and struggle, and the recognition that in a monist world – because there is no ‘other level’ that makes things do what they do – everything is necessarily relational and contextual rather than essential and absolute. Finally, new materialists emphasize ontology (concern with the kinds of things that exist) over epistemology (which addresses how these things can be known by an observer). Epistemological debates over whether it is possible to know a social world beyond human constructs (or even if there is such a world independent of human thought) has divided social scientists, and has erected barriers between quantitative and qualitative research approaches that appear to deal with different aspects of the social. New materialist scholars regard their own efforts to re-focus on ontology as a means to cut across an irresolvable argument between realists (who believe there is a knoweable world independent of observers) and idealists (who regard the world as the product of human constructs), but also as necessary to address assumptions about what matter is and what it does. This has profound significance for research methodology, as will be seen later in this entry. | New Materialism, Nick J Fox and Pam Alldred | criticallegalthinking.com Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, direct them towards needlessly narrow ends. Patent wars and idea monopolisation are contemporary phenomena that point to both capital’s need to move beyond competition, and capital’s increasingly retrograde approach to technology. The properly accelerative gains of neoliberalism have not led to less work or less stress. And rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration. | criticallegalthinking.com | chaosmatrix.org From the very beginning of his history, Western man has sought to defeat this most relentless of enemies - chaos. He has searched for words and gestures to tame the chaotic, arbitrary wills of his earliest Gods. He has created the image of an all powerful deity who not only brought order out of nothingness but is the essence of the law. He has chosen innumerable tyrannies, preferring the loss of his very soul to the sight of dogs running wild in his streets. He has examined the world around him, hoping to find inflexible laws. He has almost destroyed the original conditions of his planet - the very processes that make his life possible - in order to control every facet of his existence, often sacrificing his deepest instincts on the altar of his need for stability. And where he could neither find nor impose order, he has devised myths, dogmas, convoluted philosophical speculations, occult formulae and sterile scientific theories, murdering anyone who dared question these fancies - all to deny the terror he feels when faced with what he cannot understand. From the darkest past to this very second, his image of the wise one has been of someone who knew the secret law hidden beneath the seemingly arbitrary world around him. His vision of the magician has been of someone who could exploit that law to bend to his will the ever-changing event of life. Yet, beginning in the late Sixties and continuing into the present, voices from England - that least chaotic of countries, home of manicured gardens, tea at four, and a class system that fixes each person's place with their first breath ‹ have proclaimed chaos the only reality, the true source of all Magick. Angry, and at times shrill, they scream denunciations at those who proclaim the quest for divine order. They worship that most ancient enemy - chaos. | chaosmatrix.org | Capitalism in the Web of Life - Jason W. Moore Capitalism makes nature. Nature makes capitalism. Both are true, provided we take these as interpenetrated realities in which “capitalism” is co-produced. This is not - emphatically not — the co-production of two separate entities: Humanity and Nature. Capitalism is a co-produced history of human-initiated projects and processes bundled with (and within) specific natures. Historical-geographical specificity is called for at every step. The web of life itself evolves historically. In this, “nature” (and its cognates) is a way of conceptualizing not merely the objects of capitalist activity. For the web of life is more than “taps” and “sinks.” It is the field upon which capitalism unfolds. And we can go still further. Nature is no static field, but is itself renewing and evolving in cyclical and cumulative fashion. Nature is, above all, historical. This means two things. First, capitalism does not “produce” nature in a linear fashion, but is an evolving whole that joins the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature. Second, capitalism is not a structurally invariant, monolithic Society, acting upon a structurally invariant, external Nature. Rather, the history of capitalism is one of successive historical natures, which are both producers and products of capitalist development. The point is elementary but underappreciated. At a time when no serious critical scholar would undertake a study of neoliberal capitalism by using “production in general,” much of Green thought continues to embrace a notion of “nature in general.” This point may seem far removed from contemporary political questions. I wish to suggest that it is anything but. For the concept of “nature in general” has made it easy for many scholars and activists to embrace the apocalyptic imaginaries of catastrophe and collapse. Absent the specicification of historical natures that encompass humanity, nature-in-general has driven Green politics into an “either/or” position: sustainability or collapse. | Capitalism in the Web of Life - Jason W. Moore |||| So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again. ||||