|||| 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. |||| | DUSTY diffractionscollective.org Always my favorite Marx characterization of Capital which Fisher tinged with Eldritch and Eerie flavor: "once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; (HERE IS THE proto-cybernetic GRIST FOR THE MILL) ""this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages."" | DUSTY diffractionscollective.org | phys.org/news/2019-05-million-co2-historic-high.html All of human history has been in a colder climate than now. The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday (May 11 2019) morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm). The last time Earth's atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than three million years ago, when global sea levels were several metres higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest. While there is some disagreement over what would constitute "safe" atmospheric CO2 levels, there is a broad consensus that 350 ppm—a level surpassed in the late 1980s—would stave off runaway global warming. | phys.org/news/2019-05-million-co2-historic-high.html | sumrevija.si 11 Eternal Phenotype Species are strategies, from extremophiles on the moon Enceladus to wolf packs on the Pontic steppe. Schizoanalysis contravenes the obscene “Wolf-Man” subjectivity of “puerile Freudian symbolism”2 with the fact that “wolves travel in packs.”3 Psychoanalytic sexual thaumaturgy is to delay and prevent the targeting and assassination of those who oppose the mobilisation of a war machine: “The wolves never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already decided from the very beginning that animals could only serve to represent coitus.”4 The survival of the pack is hidden in the blood transmission of a strategy. The black propaganda of coitus representation distracts from the more fundamental operation of information transfer and replication. When schizoanalysis is infused with an evolutionary dynamic driven by the mystery of survival and immortality, “proliferating affects” that “spread contagion”6 are now understood as (knowable) strategies practised in a state of (unknown) war. Schizophrenic disordering through endless becoming is also just another deceptive layer of the fog of war. The wolf only becomes a species when it is initiated into the strategy of the pack and the worship of an unseen solution (order within order). The overwhelming disproportion of historical life forms that lie in the mass grave of extinct organisms means that the concept of species, understood in the classical sense, is closer to death than to life, while strategy can survive long enough to see the end of the world. | sumrevija.si 11 | To Live and Think Like Pigs ...humanity is reduced to a bubble of rights, not going beyond strict biological functions of the yum-yum-fart type. . .as well as the vroom-vroom and beep-beep of cybernetics and the suburbs. . .So people with entirely adequate IQs don’t become free individuals. . .instead they constitute what I call cyber-livestock […] All fresh meat, all fresh brains, must become quantifiable and marketable. | To Live and Think Like Pig | alienistmanifesto.wordpress.com/ PRINCIPLES OF ANARCHITECTURE FORM FOLLOWS DYSFUNCTION Synthesis isn’t an aggregate but an operation feeding off entropy (the exchange-mechanism of “Capital”). // 001b. FORM STALKS DYSFUNCTION Utopia is a non-place the intellect retreats to in order to fail on its own terms, to enjoy every painful contraction. Heresy was able to claim that nothing had really changed; the world was the same as ever, the exile no different than before. There is no going back once was written. ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL INTO FRICTIONLESS INTERSECTING PLANES Entropy is proportional to the logarithm of the total number of microstates (ways an architecture can be configured in microcosm while leaving its general description unchanged). // 002b. ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL IN PREPARATION FOR A PLANETARY IMPACT EVENT Entropy is proportional to the logarithm expressing the total number of microstates (people). An architecture can be configured whose general description is unhinged. The Anthropocene is the art object par excellence. ARCHITECTURE BELIEVES THAT IT IS MORE THAN A THING AMONG THINGS Redeveloping commodified false-consciousness into a unifying system of commodified spacetime. // 003b. ARCHITECTURE BELIEVES THAT IT’S MORE THAN ANOTHER THING AMONG THINGS Developing commodified false-consciousness into a unifying system demands liminal fraud, contortions of the hindbrain, the elongated ridges of the hippocampus. Origin is guesswork, character assassination: a disused cut-up – ensign of social ignition. CONSTRUCTION BY CORRELATION The impetus of architectural “economies of scale” is the communication between quantum & cosmos. // 004b. CONSTRUCTION BY PARALLAX VIEW Architecture gives shape to the communication between quantum & cosmos, assuming the character of “understance” – the lineaments of a spectral countenance, quivering threads of white light. ORDER BY ESCALATION Singularity abolishes the singular (Kowloon-syndrome). // 005b. DISORDER BY ESCALATION For a given energy there’s an upper limit to the density of information about the elements that comprise it, implying spacetime itself can’t be infinitely subdivided. All bodies of reference are equal for the description of phenomena, whatever their state of motion. Grace is the exception. | alienistmanifesto.wordpress.com/ | vastabrupt.com [[ Fanged Poetics ]] : Preliminary Notes on a Dark Conceptualism The fanged poet is not necessarily or entirely human — they are mythic, animal, cyborg, prophetic, divine, etc. The fanged poet is “a dangerous, cruel alien” often positioned as “an evil outsider”.2 They arrive from elsewhere, pouring over the edges of the human container, oozing into different material planes, emphasizing the immaterial within the material. Materiality is not negated, but revealed as a flattened world of textual sludge. They don’t make work for people, but to invite the possibility of annihilation. Accelerating darkness without intentionality. The fanged poet mimics humans, with retractable fangs, and subtle forms of camouflage or refractive techniques. The fanged poet is not a vampire, but more serpentine — less seductive, more venomous. 1| The fanged poet makes life more problematic 2| Sides with thought against knowledge 3| Operates through chance 4| Invasion, not expression 5| Moves towards the unknown 6| Is immoral // immor(t)al 7| The fanged poet makes poetry hideous 8| Infests, seeps through, and destroys | vastabrupt.com | marchudson.net ACTIVISM AND THE #EMOTACYCLE: OPINIONS/SUGGESTIONS SOUGHT. It is now over thirty years since the general public were made aware of climate change (n.b. the threat of anthropogenic global warming had been at least mentioned in specialist publications for almost 20 years before that, and the oil industry was keeping tabs from the 1960s). So, now is a good time to examine the reasons for the failure of social movements to sustain concerted radical pressure on elites and force a societal (indeed, socio-technical) transition. The smugosphere is the place where things are done not because they might be effective but because they meet the emotional/status needs of those (individuals or groups/organisations) who do them. If a student doesn’t study for their exams, they get robust feedback. If an athlete doesn’t train for the tournament/match, there is robust feedback they can’t explain away. If politicians don’t knock on doors, kiss babies and do what Rupert tells them… you get the idea. In most fields of human activity there is a link between effort/innovation and outcomes. Except in climate activism. “Activists” don’t generally get text messages from angry polar bears saying “your marches/petitions/camps have achieved nothing, thanks” or a voicemail from a child born in 2030 saying similar. And in the absence of feedback, people tend to keep doing what they’re “good” at, what gives them importance in their tribe, what helps them sleep at night. And the big wheel keeps on turning. the four phases within the emotacycle, examining what emotions are allowed/encouraged/discouraged at various stages – the psycho-social dynamics – and the passage between the phases: 1. The Big Event (a march, rally, camp) 2. The aftermath, where disappointment and despair are contained; 3. The Re-evaluation, where “next steps” are mooted; 4. Feeder Events (aka the Frank N Furter manoeuvre) Individuals are battling – if they understand the climate science – sheer terror. And when we are scared we tend to do what those around us are doing (for better or worse – over-reacting or under-reacting). And if everyone is going on marches and calling that activism, then so be it. Rather than think about what particular skills they have, what skills they could cultivate, people are invited to see themselves as fodder for organisations. Mostly, rather than doing long-term, non-co-opted, boring/un-adrenaliney grunt work (a walk on part in the war) it’s easier (and more socially acceptable) to swap that for a lead role in the cage. So it goes. Ultimately, participation in the emotacycle works as a selection pressure against those who do not have spare time, cash, hope. Who has the time to go to feeder events and then the Big Event. Or, they go to the Big Event and call that activism, call that their ‘duty’. Ultimately, this way of organising means that the ghetto is sustained Organisationally, well, if your group is good at “doing” marches (booking coaches, printing placards etc), then that is what you are going to keep doing, isn’t it? And turning people into ego-fodder and forcing them into the emotacycle is EASIER, requires less courage, less imagination, less skill. And so it persists. Not to be determinist or anything. If you name this, expect to be shouted down as “opposed to activism”. Expect to be sneeringly asked “well, what’s your alternative” and then be interrupted as you try to explain it. Expect to be resisted by those who see your criticism as a personal reproach for the decades they wasted, the “human resources” they have let slip through their hands from the endless enaction of the emotacycle. Ultimately, this may be beyond the grasp of some people. Socio-dynamics tend to be poorly understood, or ignored or repressed. We have need of the liberal myth that we are atoms bouncing off each other. | marchudson.net | lesswrong.com Buddhists also often speak of freedom more literally in terms of indifference, and there’s a very straightforward logic to this; you can only choose equally between A and B if you have been “liberated” from the attractions and aversions that constrain you to choose A over B. Those who insist that Buddhism is compatible with a fairly normal life say that after Buddhist practice you still will choose systematically most of the time — your utility function cannot fully flatten if you act like a living organism — but that, like Viktor Frankl’s ideal human, you will be able to reflect with equinamity and consider choosing B over A; you will be more “mentally flexible.” Of course, some Buddhist texts simply say that you become actually indifferent, and that sufficient vipassana meditation will make you indistinguishable from a corpse. As social organizations “mature” and become larger, it becomes harder to enforce universal and impartial rules, harder to keep the larger population aligned on similar goals, and harder to comprehend the more complex phenomena in this larger group. . This means that there’s both motivation and opportunity to carve out “hidden” and “special” zones where arbitrary behavior can persist even when it would otherwise come with negative consequences. New or small organizations, by contrast, must gain/create resources or die, so they have more motivation to “optimize” for resource production; and they’re simple, small, and/or homogeneous enough that legible optimization rules and goals and transparent communication are practical and widely embraced. “Security” is not available to begin with, so people mostly seek opportunity instead. Not everything people call reason, logic, justice, or optimization, is in fact reasonable, logical, just, or optimal; so, a person needs some defenses against those claims of superiority. In particular, defenses that can shelter them even when they don’t know what’s wrong with the claims. And that’s the closest thing we get to an argument in favor of arbitrariness. It’s actually not a bad point, in many contexts. The counterargument usually has to boil down to hope — to a sense of “I bet we can do better.” | lesswrong.com | Nietzsche, The Gay Science §109, 1882 Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that he universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a “machine” does it far too much honor. | Nietzsche, The Gay Science §109, 1882 | Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red [...] if there is one good thing about capitalism it is that under it, Mother Earth no longer exists. The core of ecological crisis is a phenomenon noted already by MARX, the so-called “metabolic rift” caused by expanding capitalist productivity. In Wark’s words: “Labor pounds and wheedles rocks and soil, plants and animals, extracting the molecular flows out of which our shared life is made and remade. But those molecular flows do not return from whence they came” (xiii). When such a rift caused by human industry begins to pose a threat to the very reproduction of life on earth, so that humanity literally becomes a geological factor, we enter a new era of the Anthropocene: The Anthropocene is a series of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself. (xiv) (McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red) We should thus move beyond the Deleuzian opposition between molecular and molar, which ultimately reduces the molar level to a shadowy theatre of representations, in relation to a molecular level of actual productivity and life-experience. | Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red | Miloš Vojtěchovský, Post-Naturalia – Krištof Kintera According to [Buckminster Fuller’s theory of tensegrity – tensional integrity], the basic expression of organized living matter is its ability to resist gravity. The formation of firm organs, such as bones, tendons and muscles, is predicated on this tectonic principle of tension. The extracellular matrix organizes cells into tissue, and the cells adjust and retain their shape based on the cytoskeleton scaffolding which is manifest both at the macro and the micro, or molecular, scale. Miloš Vojtěchovský, Post-Naturalia – Krištof Kintera (2017) | Miloš Vojtěchovský, Post-Naturalia – Krištof Kintera | Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters The domain of machine and non-machine non-humans (the unhuman in my terminology) joins people in the building of the artifactual collective called nature. None of these actants can be considered as simply resource, ground, matrix, object, material, instrument, frozen labor; they are all more unsettling than that. | Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters | Dustin Breitling, SalvagePatch Discharge, Diffractions Collective It seethes and screams: A paralyzed witness to the chiseling of the topographies of tomorrow as the current jigsaw of the planet melts into charred and submerged landscapes, landscapes sculpted by an unwavering ‘heat’ that enshrouds us in the pell-mell of the present. It is a heat that propels new seizures of territories and invasions, as nations are aligning their gaze firmly on the goldmine in the Arctic Circle. The churning waters and rapidly disappearing glacier tides are beckoning the next battlefield over future shipping lanes, minerals, hydrocarbon excavation rights, and bases. It is a heat that bubbles in the cauldron of our contemporary Metropolis, now engulfed in demonstrations and uprisings, awakening us to a taste of the oncoming ‘New Normal’: a morphing geopolitical configuration that unravels in the wake of Climate Breakdown. A preview of this ‘New Normal’ has been projected and felt by populations, as we have bore witness to both the deluge of studies and cataclysmic events that are anticipated to intensify through an onslaught of storms, forest fires, droughts, coral bleaching, heat waves or floods. The recent 2018 IPCC’s Special Report 1.5 Celsius report and Fourth Climate Change Assessment published last October and November respectively, have issued dire forecasts of what looms in the horizon for the upcoming 12 years, where estimates that a .5 Celsius increase will catapult us into an era of turbulent tipping points | Dustin Breitling, SalvagePatch Discharge, Diffractions Collective /// The focus of my work is the elaboration of a coherent and compelling model of non-representational poetic production — thought through temporality and theorised as 'xenopoetics' — that operates across and in excess of the human, and is thereby capable of accommodating increasingly significant non-human modes of production. Amy Ireland | Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926 The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. | Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926 /// THE MYTH OF THE ABSENCE OF MYTH An immense fraud has been perpetuated in contemporary thought, founded on the persuasion that modern life is a malaise – a decadence – produced by an “absence of myth.” It has dwelt in modernity’s shadow from the outset, the most fervent purveyor of its decadence, like a jealous doppelgänger. Yet, far from abolishing myth, modernity is in fact constituted by the greatest myth of all: the myth of perpetual progress; of the extraction & consumption of natural resources without end & the magical transformation of human waste back into nature. This is what the blood-&-soil of the Corporate-State amounts to: the belief that – in greater abundance than the old gods, at the service of individual gratification & without cost to the collective conscience – Capitalism will provide. This mystification of industry (of technology in general), fed by a complete disregard for ecological consequences, has led – with all the negative pathos of a child’s fairytale – straight down the path of catastrophe. Catastrophe on a truly mythic scale. For it is this – & not its absence – that will define every possible human future to come. Interior Ministry, Death by Resurrection (2018) /// | sdbs.cz a tool to address a core set of issues of our era: The prevalent and everspreading apathy and anhedonia (not to mention acedia and anomie) that seem to consume human lives more and more with each generation. The inability of most humans (under the aforementioned circumstances) to work together on fulfilling projects with trust and accountability. The need for psychospiritual damage control and mythopoetic experiences in the face of a multifaceted species-wide crisis (composed of various humanitarian, ecological, technosocial, political, cultural and other challenges). The lack of proactive and progressive cultural platforms capable of supporting young artists and thinkers who feel the need to address the issues mentioned above, as well as a lack of connective tissue between the few platforms that do exist. | sdbs.cz /// Is your [DEEP ADAPTATION] the same as the “survivalist” or “prepper” perspective? There is a similar starting point: it is time to accept a social collapse is coming. But the discussion I’m inviting is about collective responses to reduce harm, rather than how a few people could tough it out to survive longer than others. I appreciate that prepper or survivalist responses to anticipating collapse will spread. I don’t think it will work at their goal of guaranteeing comparative longevity, given the unpredictability of the complex systems we live within. My own experience is indicative. In June, with a group of friends we toured around some eco-projects, where people have made a choice to live off the land, to varying degrees. One of those places was near Rafina, which was at the epicentre of the tragic fires in Greece just a month later. You may think you have thought of all eventualities and will have – until you haven’t. We can and should look to live more resiliently and closer to the land that feeds us, but there are no guarantees that this will help. I also think survivalism can be a form of denial: by getting busy rather than allowing oneself to process and integrate a nearer sense of the mortality of oneself and those we love. The likelihood of climate-induced collapse invites us to make time in our lives, right now, for existential and spiritual questions. That can then help us whatever choices we make on how to approach the future. jembendell on August 10, 2018, Dialogue on Deep Adaptation /// the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the “homely” (even in negation) [— that is, as opposed to Freud’s unheimlich or the “unhomely”]. The form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage — the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie |||| Subtle Distortions of Basic Sensibilities ||||