South Korean nature documentary directed by Seung-woo Son
“With 4K UHD quality, EBS Docuprime ‘Green Animal’ is a documentary of plants’ life stories by looking for wonderful plants on the Earth by visiting five major oceans and six major continents for about two years. It shows nature’s beautiful scenes with a secret of primal, and illuminates plants that were discounted as static existences with a new point of view. It follows plants’ lives with the actor Sung-hwa Jung’s narration.
As plants cannot move, they couldn’t choose good land by themselves. The program reveals plants’ dynamic movements and strategies for survival and their unimaginable life stories. It lively describes images of plants moving for survival by fair means or foul through interval filming, micrography, and electron microscope. With a high-speed camera, it also captured even a hundredth of a second movement created by plants.” (here is more about the documentary from the press conference launch)
Here is a French/ARTE version of it in three parts:
An Essay Documentary Film narrated by and featuring Korean-German Philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han talks about the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘Burnout Society’. He raises the question of how we want to live today, and uncovers the underlying themes of an achievement-oriented digital society.
Without reading none of his celebrated books, I still have a big reluctance of what I regard a well-qualified but still blatantly anti-technological stance that Byung-Chul Han professes. To me, that smells too much of Martin Heidegger and too little of Marshall MacLuhan. There is also the feeling that there is too much convergence with the current (fully digitized) mindfulness. In a sense ‘smart’ technologies themselves offer nowadays an improved default mindfulness setting, as if in agreement with what Zizek once called a ‘decaffeinated’ version, a new sort of Decaf Reality. Mindfulness apps abound. Remains to be seen if these are just adjustments on the go – another sign that there is more and more need for what is perceived as “growing disillusionment” with future prospects and what feels more and more like a ‘labor camp’ type Googlag working environment. Tang ping is another term that is being coined completely independent from Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of post-Fordist malaise, but has a lot in common with his ideas about the current threadmill.
I also think that Byung-Chul Han’s emphasis on Panopticon is still much too imprecise and tributary to Foucault’s own predilection for early modern examples, so it risks (in my mind) missing out on the current shift of digital governance from Foucalt’s older ‘panopticon’ to the (particularly in China but also Gaza Strip/Israel) new model of ‘panspectron’ (as highlighted by Gabriele de Seta and Rogier Creemers.
By posting this documentary essay that I quite like, it is important on Byung-Chul Han – a star philosopher of recent years. Yes, I consider his ideas timely, zeitgeisty and appreciate very much his slide from studying metallurgy to philosophy and art theory. I also think that anything that might help slow down or throw some light on the nature of time (of Money) transformations under financial capitalism, or on the ideology of work, on the workings of ‘hustle culture’ and the gig economy, on ‘death by overwork’ (過労死, Karōshi), for qualifying the so-called Asian economic miracle as capitalist mode of hyper-production, and on paradoxical modes of incomplete, non-utilitarian, Taoist (emptiness philosophy inflected) non-productivist, non-optimized living speaks to this very moment of tiredness and widening depression. His own wanderings trough both East/West and his necrosophic musings within cemetery grounds and poetry (as seen in this documentary) brings him very close to my own orientation and others that I have been collaborating with over the years. He also makes a very cool reference to the Momo novel by Michael Ende that turns out to be one of the most precious and timely books on accelerationism or today’s burnout society.
Special thanks to Felix P for sharing the books of Byung-Chul Han and especially this documentary.
I very recently (this year) discovered the following study and this discovery has made me very happy – indeed it has brought me back full circle to other pursuits I have followed these last years. It has been a daunting but also incredibly satisfying and slow-moving adventure to unravel Whitehead’s organic philosophy year by year. I have read ANW in German, English and Romanian and I am grateful to these translators and editors and popularizers of his works. I am thankful for all those that have listened to and communicated on the margins my continuing yet uneven advances – Gabi, Julia, Nae, Felix, Akira, amongst others. This post deals only in its end section with the above mentioned book in trying to add more context to A N Whitehead’s process philosophy and panpsychism. In the end I point out why I think The Outward Mind adds (for me) a few important missing ingredients that allow for much larger historical width.
There is a sense A N Whitehead is always historically aware of the philosophical precedents of what he coins ‘organic philosophy’ (be is Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza or Hume and Kant) authors he mentions repeatedly and often quotes, even as he makes clear one has to read them against their own conclusions and their (later) systematized traditions. Whitehead makes sure he can always rescue and scavenge significant bits – odd turns of phrases that he transforms into something significant against the intentions of their authors. He picks up on strange discontinuities, missteps or non-systematic intuitions in the well known works of all these named predecessors which are not actually his direct predecessors in fact, nor is he a direct succesor. In Science in the Modern World (1925) he jumps directly to a phrase from the founder of scientific method – Francis Bacon(1561 – 1626). These remote references are indirectly shaping up his own organic philosophy almost by what they are not saying, and only because he makes something else out of them and spells out what they could have said but aren’t saying. He takes great care that he carefully weaves his own elaborate metaphysical reconstructions in a patient way, twisting and upgrading a jagged intellectual continuum. ANW almost always appreciates the unorganized side of major thinkers, appreciates their incipient striving and lacunae more than what they would have ever admit. He picks as important – certain odd tidbits or whatever did not make it into the ‘final draft’ or settled into a recognizable and canonical Tractatus. With this patient, only slightly pedantic nit-picking, ANW makes sure that he and us (his possible readers) are in constant contact with others and kept involved with their inherited list of ideas developed under a very different and disjunct historical period (somehow detached fron his or his immediate predecessors). The impact of several Western authors is felt at a distance and without their accord, it feels. The result is that what does not get mentioned or lies outside of their conclusion – feels much more important.
He is hailed as the only modern philosopher that has developed with insistence and detail the most complex metaphysical project to date – responsive to the most relevant scientific theories of his day (relativity theory and quantum mechanics). I am wondering about the atmosphere that has shaped such interests – the “penumbral” historical background that sustained and nurtured ANW’s mature metaphysics – outside the range of names he dutifully mentions in his key books (Process & Reality or Science and the Modern World, etc) and the philosophical idiom he uses.
One of the best things in reading him is that one is not dragged down by genuflection in front of such a heavyweight philosophical inheritance (or lack of reading all these fundamental texts). No jungle of footnotes, nor lengthy, winded polemics. His polemics (if they exist) are not so much with authors, but with certain aporias of Western thinking. His engagement is a long shot wrestling with meta-theories of mindmatter or directions of research. Even when he is always mentioning what organic philosophy is not, he skips dense webs of references – and this is an integral part of his low profile tone and no name-dropping style.
Yet I am left with all these residual questions – of why Aesthetics is thephilosophia primafor him? How come there is this easy (and surprisingly contemporary) involvement with en-minding matter or the building blocks of reality? Why is mind or experience so central to his cosmology? Why does he find this en-minding of matter as fundamental to our understanding the most recent theories of physics? These are important questions and I am always feeling a nuub in relation to ANW – but somehow they are related to him.
What I appreciate is his evolutionary and bottom-up or rather the bottom is tbe new up perspective. Where does his non-anthropocentrism or his physiological interest stem from? Another unusual convergence allows him to share these preoccupations with various philosophers of mind. Whiteheadian panpsychism (the most developed modern panpsychism we have probably) needs engagement whatever they might say. Yet it is very rare that he ever gets a mention in recent books on the subject of consciousness or the ‘hard problem of consciousness (apart from William Seager or David Ray Griffin). The same thing happens with other authors – Galen Strawson, whose mentalistic physicalism comes close to Whitehead (but rarely mentions him) reviewing a book (Philip Goff’s -Galileo’s Error) by fellow panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff and chiding them over not mentioning a larger and more complete list of processors beside Arthur Eddington and Betrand Russell. A list that according to Galen Strawson should perforce include: W K Clifford, CA Strong and Durant Drake.
It is almost as if this amnesia about Whitehead helps their own project along and keeps them free of what Thomas Nagel has called (in 1986): “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”. What I am trying to say is that everyone is allowed to have favorite genealogies or mention his own chosen predecessors, yet when it concerns panpsychism – the ‘pan’ is historically eliminativist, always tends to choose certain authors over others. Whitehead’s is a difficult inheritance. One can get lost mired in his verbiage or become outright dismissive of his entire metaphysical edifice. If mentioning him one might risk attracting the wrong attention, loose face, loose readers, respectability etc what do I know – it seems. What if one’s own carefully thought-out theories of mind would get doomed by mentioning him repeatedly or giving him due credit. Maybe it is the usual academic risk or careful tip-toeing , a normal fear of being convicted as guilty by association or of being treated as (dangerously) ‘speculative’ or even (damning) humbug.
I will pick up on A. Nagel’s (pejorative) mention of the “metaphysical laboratory” and its slight air of slight superiority. Yes, maybe it is good to cut straight to the chase, yet I consider the problem exactly the opposite. It is not a problem of clear-cutting, but of allowing more largesse. Otherwise, everything feels like miraculous birth – and we might miss a certain underlying commonality or an impetus from a completly different set of theories. In fact, I do miss this laboratory feeling, that there was a certain vaguely related but varied and diverse range of authors that could have prepared A N Whitehead’s arguments at a distance and up close. I think that his particular and quite original approach suffers from this lack of historical density or having a wider range of domains (outside the strictly philosophical) to chose from. A dialogue that is not primarily even between philosophers and so does not enter the canonic mind philosophy list.
For me Whitehead is the tip of an unseen iceberg of largely ignored or only alluded to free speculation anchored in embodied research. It smells of a long term involvement with mindmatter, enlivened materialism, transmissible, diffuse and active affect, “sensuous knowledge” (like in Adorno or Ranciere). Instead of ignoring the body and objects it sees them as affecting and being affected, prolonging scientific and artistic interests with low-end organisms and non-human emotions. Let’s say this could range from Darwin’s letting his kids play music to worms or feeding carnivorous plants in his hothouse or William James’s (he gets ample mention in Whitehead) interest in empiricism, physiology, embodiment, nervous tissues and a graded/gradual evolutionary view of mind.
Whitehead is eminently a dispositional thinker even if when he talks about the intrinsic nature of things – because he puts you in a certain mood, and partakes of a certain disposition (perspective) of inquiring mind towards the possibility of other minds existing inside yet also outside the preferred bipedal cranial boxes. Consider this: in order to make you sensitive to certain things that would have left you indifferent, he takes on the perspective of an elementary particle (also recently discovered) electron – what is it like to be an electron? Does this sound so different from Einstein trying to imagine what it is like to be traveling like a photon on his bike? Yet this ability of inhabiting the elementary should point us towards non-scarcity in regard to AWN complex ideas since his own system does this on a regular basis. It searches for this granularity, this gradient – something that is not miraculous, exceptional, nothing special but usual, ‘mere’ and primary. Consciousness or higher-level faculties of the mind are not isolated, insular or put on a pedestal. They are just a special case out of a much more varied non-special, available readiness for experiencing of the world by the world. He is very keen on making sure that we accept this pervasiveness of mind and explore under-explored semi conscious avenues of feeling and becoming.
Let’s apply this pervasive gradient-thinking approach to his own system, as a system that is being nourished by other domains. It interested with the new, becose it is growing out of or exploding the bounds of a much larger epochal context (in tune with his cosmic epochs there is this larger missing history).
What I felt was missing from both Whitehead’s account of his own ideas as well as from others mentioning their own Whiteheadian engagements is this relevant and disconsidered (till now) historical background noise. I appreciate this dim largely experimental aesthetic background radiation because it puts things in contrast and proves to be a laboratory of philosophical ideas & stimulants.
Here I place this recently discovered wonderful study – with a role in filling in these gaps. This book by Benjamin Morgan is called The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Again, Benjamin M does not mention ANW directly, because ANW is somehow outside of the scope of this historical study of experimental and materialistic aesthetics, but at the same time, ANW is one of those that have enjoyed and absorbed & engaged with a lot of what The Outward Mind aims to be about. This book, I think, reconstructs a missing historical Gedankenkollectiv that offers many other gradations, graded ways in which the late Victorian era (I get more and more convinced this is so) has transmitted disparate and conflicting(even paradoxical) interests with developments from the physical sciences, mathematics etc or concerns with the naturalization of mental processes. Heidegger for me is a key philosopher and contemporary of ANW that somehow willingly obscures this Victorian background noise. He is closer to the Critical Idiom in his refusal to engage with these scientific pursuits, since he often openly disparaged technology and science. In a sense his own anti-scientific stance manages to produce a tabula rasa in regard to all these previously very rich cross-overs and intellectual climates that (according to Benjamin Morgan) characterized experimental or laboratory aesthetics in both Germany (since Helmholtz) and Great Britain (US and France and other places?!). Looking fwd to reading this book.
Benjamin Morgan Introduction sums up numerous such cases in order to show us that there was much more appetite from the 1850s on for this sort of hybrid preoccupations that seem to dwindle afterward or get lost with the two cultures split (arts vs sciences). This externalization of mind, this en-minding of matter, or the generalization of the feeling process across the vastness of a newly discovered universe is very similar to what Whitehead is keeping alive and reinforcing with new ardor. All these necessarily fresh additions have been osmotically traveling across the scientific membrane into art theory. One such example is the lecture “What Patterns Do to Us” by Scottish art theorist Clementina “Kit” Caroline Anstruther-Thomson(1857–1921).
Zeros and Ones is a 2021 American-Italian thriller film written and directed by Abel Ferrara. It stars Ethan Hawke, Cristina Chiriac, Phil Neilson, Valerio Mastandrea, Dounia Sichov, Korlan Madi, Mahmut Sifa Erkaya and Anna Ferrara. (wiki)
I decided to repost my thread with first thoughts on Abel Ferra’s remarkable last production. Altough hard to encapsulate and probably not a success with the critics – Ferrara’s late foray into current world affairs is one of the most visionary & contemporary things out there. It’s impossible for me to sum up but it as if he took wll our daily digital supper, all the aberran and yet so real and hard to encapsulate -apocalyptic moods and made them into a movie. My tw were posted as sort of personal notes freshly after watching it online and reading just Steven Shaviro’s blog review (he’s a big Ferrara fan). I stumbled on Ferrara almost by chance, wachted Bad Lieutenant with my father as an adolescent. We were both blasted apart. There was nothing to compare it with. Will never forget his academic vampire movie (The Addiction) – a total and welcome radical reworking of old horror tropes.
Watched Abel Ferarras ZEROS and Ones (2021). Incredibile piece of work – almost an anti war, conspiracy & spy genre movie. It's like nothing I've seen coming out of COVID era. Filmed almost entirely at night in Covid Rome.https://t.co/Ze5nXWyCmD
Everything else seems passé or cliché in comparison, completly missing the pulse of the times. Vatican explodes (implodes?). Feeds of video streams & online blackmail material is ubiquitous. A complot without a plot. Explanations are superfluous.
The slick & vacuous corporate ruthlessness of Ferrara's New Rose Hotel (1998) gave way to ceaseless military industrial machinations, gagging orders deceptions & smoke screens. Water boarding & hand sanitizers are part of the very same world. [Julian Assange gets extradited :(].
It has been going on since 1000 years, but no one seems to know precisely what, apart from mullahs & anti imperialist homeless suicide bombers. Almost everyone seems to act against their own best interests. "Jesus was a soldier but nobody knows on who's side."~voicever
In the wake of Pentagon's new approved aberrant military budget – A. Ferrara's ZEROS and Ones – lets the whole preemptive, self actualizing illogic of War on Terror infuse every corner of life. Stripped of its makeshift ideological facade – collusion & complicity widen the maze.
Ethan Hawke's character pandemic rules seem both strict & lax at the same time. Everything is mediated technologically: the torture, honey traps, backroom deals, confessions under truth drugs. Feverish self immolation & enlightenment ideals both gush out during interrogation.
(Zeros and Ones made me think of Sadie Plant's 1997 groundbreaking cyber feminist clasic) Ferrara acknowledges this digital (video) ubiquity and near instantaneity of special ops, transmissions, being one step ahead. Computer screens get shot. Warnings spoken through video call.
Night lit monuments of Rome filmed as with a phone camera. Documentary style long shots of lonely streets get mashed with closeups & grainy, almost night vision camera or even (?) CNN bombarded skies over Baghdad, zoom blackmail, pixelated explosions by unknown terror bombings.
Remarkable movie by a director in his 70s. Not going to find any narrative – if that's what youre looking for. Even Ethan Hawke's (as himself) prologue & epilogue framing, maintains contradictions + unnerving incompatibility – a key duplicity you might say almost intact.
One of my favorite lines from Ferrara's Zeros and Ones – (beside many others "no worries they're negative") Ethan Hawke's brother ranting under truth serum: "Your strippers are Marxist!"
The Expanse has received critical acclaim, with particular praise for its visuals, character development and political narrative. (wiki)
There is no denying The Expanse (now in its 6th and final season) has marked and will continue to mark the recent history of SF world-building – as a new phase in the development of the genre, especially in its socially aware forms.
Divergence 1
This it has done in two ways – by finally catching up with his literary material – the works of James S. A. Corey (none of which I have read) and the current world affairs. Most of the current blockbuster big-epic production of current SF (last year’s Foundation series and Dune by Denis Villeneuve are prime examples) have a nearly 60 years cinematic delay in regard with their original works. Besides what we could term the certain ‘neo-feudal’ or ‘techno-feudal’ (after Yanis Varoufakis) traits of both Foundation and Dune adaptations, including cloned emperors, barons, warring ruling families, there might be high time to look beyond the generally universally accepted and canonical. It is for the first time Earthers are not imbued with nostalgia – but with a sort of general reproach (both from Martian society and the Belters) as a planet of wasted resources and exploitative catabolic collapse civilizations. While antagonism remain in place even in peace, there is a lingering emotional involvement with all of the three branches of humanity. The Corvette-class light frigate Rocinante rag-tag team of Belters (humans from the Asteroid Belt), Earthers and Martians (humans on Mars) and their winded stories along the course of 6 seasons (which is a long time for today’s streaming) encourage the viewer away to avoid latching onto the good/bad dualist divisions that have characterized previous space operas.
Yes, I get why there is all this accumulated historical pressure or emotional investment built upon investment in SF sagas. Yes, I appreciate the ongoing interest of big production in established franchises and foundational SF cycles. Yet when will some current contemporary classics hit the big (or home) screen? Do we have to hope that someday, some huge Big Tech brother or geek entrepreneur (akin to Amazon Bezos or Apple+ or Disney+?), after light-years of lobbying might deem it worthwhile? There is signs that in reality, a broad-based and devoted new fandom can play its hand in the lobbying for the continuation of favorite SF series. Amazon Prime has taken up on The Expanse reviving the series, picking it up from Syfy channel after it was canceled.
So apart from giants like Asimov and Herbert, what else is there new old? Why not dig into 1930s masterpieces by Olaf Stapeldon like Star Maker or the 1960s ‘Instrumentality’ of Cordwainer Smith or say Professor Jameson by Neil R. Jones? They are the example that something does not have to be actual or timely, and that even ‘forgotten’ works might still offer some welcome surprise. Why not expand into other directions?
The Expanse (uniquely and encouragingly so) has a certain breath, an outward expansion that emboldens us to think about our current tribulations, and that keeps on addressing current topics via a careful (never carefree) world-building effort. I call it divergent in this particular sense that it did not have to grow-up, ‘mature’ over decades to finally get released. The Expanse finally is catch up with current concerns, implications and irreducible complexities of now. One can say all the other big space adventures have tried their hand at such a cosmic scope (both Hollywood ones – ST and SW), at the same time The Expanse does not have to try, because it just feels timely and involved.
a chronological guide to the early Expanse universe
Divergence 2
Second divergence with the Expanse is its exploration that works from a different premise (a situational and consequential SF) than say the usual cycles of either placidly mythic (timeless) space opera material (in G. Lucas’s Star Wars universe), or what might strike one as totalizing & bland promoters of a blind (absolute) tech- progressivism (say in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek). My bet is that the Expanse achieves this by being socially acute in its diagnosis – class struggle does not end on Earth, it will be carried in space. Both exploitation and emancipation will not evaporate once our spaceships will start mining and settling other worlds, no matter what the early Russians cosmist said that lack of gravity will unshackle humanity (of economic, racist or patriarchal status quo). For the first time post-cinematically at least, in recent memory, space exploration is not a romanticized ‘final frontier’, the bland off-world advertisment – but a timespace continuum full of consequences and warps that merit our full attention. The Expanse nurtures an attentive concern for what it might mean to insure a more equal (fair!?) re-distribution of resources and consequences in space (where they count most) as well in spite of all war-mongering enterprises, try hard to solve conflicts via diplomatic means.
Terrorism does not equal anarchism
There is already a Reddit dedicated to discussing why the traditional anarchist symbol is associated to the OPA sign during the later seasons of The Expanse (season 5). Why is this symbol present during Marco Inaros speech? Some have seen here the usual association of violence and destruction that gets instantly blamed on anarchism from James Bond villains to Batman. At the same time, the visible nationalist tint of Marco Inaros’s cause (according to Chris Nunn) makes it hard to fit under a black-red flag.
There is no mistake that the black-bloc as well as antifa during the Trump presidency have been depicted in mainstream media predominantly as terrorists and trouble makers, while far-right terrorism has been historically been played down. Now that neoreaction and nationalism is globally on the rise, even mainstream channels have had to acknowledge (especially after the Washington Jan 6 failed coup) that far-right plots historically outnumber left-wing ones or even outweigh the concerns about the called Islamist ‘threat’. Romania, pretty much a satellite state of the US, has upped the ante with such overly exaggerated responses in its rabid media response tothose that might feebly oppose the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. Overwhelmingly the mainstream media has been blaming all disruption on the ‘anarchist’ element (in RO always a ‘necessarily foreign’ element), because the locals are all honey and milk, while local destructo-capitalism is left to roam free. So this is how The Expanse – arrives at its weakest point, although I might also add that we should always follow the women of this universe. There is a gender critique at work here, and in fact one can see women being much more capable than men overall in difficult situations, and men, especially rebel leaders tend to make fools of themselves. At the same time I do not want to let US off the hook nor rush in with labeling it US progapanda akin to the usual contras or anti-Cuban sentiment in Florida. Even in space and even with such an incredible series at the Expanse it is good to be on the lookout. I am keen to see how this villainous image of the Belter rebel hero evolves – although it feels blocked in the egotistic militaristic and violent maniac mode.
ScavengerTechnologies
Technologies – are for the first time not just stolen gifts from the Gods nor magick laser swords that can accomplish just about anything. Alien, Martian or Belter tech – no matter their true source or mysterious origin, stealth tech, they are all socially embedded in their uses and misuses, in social and economic systems and pliable only up to a point to our bidding and utilitarian aims. The Ring gate portals allow a new access towards various unknown exoplanets. These Ring portals are not just places of transit, they always seem to be responsive, always gauged and feeding on and off their ‘simple’ transit function. They are as much alien as the protomolecule, both carriers of historically -materialistic pronoucements, as well places of immigration, full of hope and danger, yet entirely prone to military-industrial exploitation. These are not easy pickings, not just appliances that await their capable human users. Beside the usual corporate vested interests, there is also scientific interest and genuine concern with using the protomolecule tech for pacific means (as there is today a drive for developeing patent-free SARS vaccines!). These incoming technologies (be it the Ring gates or the protomolecule research) get rapidly enmeshed in wider Sol system politics, most of the he times exacerbating already existing inequalities and conflicts. In the latest seasons, the protomolecule gets in the background and human factionalism and tribalism tend to take over. Each eps of the 6th season of The Expanse gets an intro from a parallel storyline on a distant world (Laconia) where a daughter of the colonists learns to use the resurrection powers of the local dog-like social creatures that are able to bring organisms (both local and foreign) back to life. Again – even if their is an unspecified sinister air to all of these ressurections (the creatures, including human ones are changed when they get back), nothing is developed – and we get the sense that human colonists are also very resistant to these changed and to difference in general.
I would actually say that the protomolecule in the Expanse is not so much about an alien tech – but about matter as such, the protean, in-itself, intrinsique qualities of a physical universe that is pretty large and full of suprises. Here I think that both The Expanse and its protomolecule and the last Star Trek (Discovery) cosmic mycelial networks – tend to integrate this enlivened scientific and speculative perspectives (one might even say a sort of pan-experientialist or recently popular panpsychist) on what was considered inert, passive matter. Life technosciences implicily work up from this new ‘animatedness’ of basic matter building blocks. In the Alien franchise, corporations where interested only in sampling alien organisms and developing them as bioweapons. In the Expanse, in tune with current technoscience developements, there is a further expansion into the very building blocks of matter. It is almost like this thourougly privatized endeavour has finally the means to try and retro-engineer (very like the methods of Synthetic biology) and unleash the hidden potentials of inoquous alien bits of matter. Today’s biocapitalism is being exploitated in a similarly retro-enginering way – pushed by both biomedical advenaces and corporate biotech vested interests that try to mine historical (non-human or inhuman) capacities that have arisen during millions of years of coevolutionary existence between bacterial cells and viruses let’s say (like the CRISPR-Cas system used in editing genes and believed to have evolved out of bacteria-bacteriophage interactions).
Cosmic Solidarity
Rocinante – and its crew is a diverse cast of characters that enacts all those conflicts as well as building up an unexpected solidarity. Initially, it was hard to dig for them. They all seemed quite uncharismatic or bland. It was much more easy to be enthusiastic for the detectivistic hard boiled characters and the strange realism of labour relations that get depicted right from the very start. Embodiment and alien-human or transformative space life hybridisation is important and with numerous after affects in the Expanse universe. Nobody is indifferent or impervious to the effects of long term-living under low gravitation or in dependency from supply chains. We see how this effects are being felt – experienced – along the whole lenght of the series seasons. Complete limb regrowth is possible, yet it is painful. Endocrine mods are possible yet, but even if they convey super human speeds they might be deadly on the long term.
Nothin is just instant future medical magic but a lengthy process that can go wrong and involve difficult and precarious decisions. Pilots can die during dangerous in-flight High G maneuvers, and gravitation affects each and everyone, yet some more than others. The threat from militarism is everywhere in the Expanse and there is the feeling that the industrial-military complex is always a constant threat to any terraforming activities and the balance of future beneficial living. No none is immune and all are united under these dire future circumstances.
Solidarity – seems to have at least one wellspring from these harsh general conditions but also from the way the Inners and especially Earthers have exploited and denied Belter (workin class) autonomy and equal rights. Beside the linguistic and cultural specificities (what one might call ethnic, racial or cultural element) and internal affinities of Belters (that have their own Idiom that reminds one of Creole or Caribbean English), there is also the economic class solidarity of the Belters. The common plight of asteroid miners, mechanics, labor migrants of the larger Asteroid Belt that have always suffered for generations as cheap and disposable labour pool for the ‘Inners’ (inner planet Earth and Mars) is a strong undercurrent in the series. I can only say that I can see a certain direct concern here with the growing number of actual climate migrants or migrant workers and displaced persons everywhere – in my case, the reality of this East European migrant pool after 1989 and the real inequalities (both economic and symbolic) exacerbated within the European Union (or Sol system unity in the case of The Expanse) highlighted by political scientist Eszter Kováts in a recent article. This is not just a case of hard scifi getting the science right or solving material contradictions – it is also about less easy to quantify traumatic effects, the scars of radiation sickness or severe trauma endured during prolonged exposure to the space vacuum that seems to afflict Belters more than everyone else. Earth in the Expanse series, even if united under a world governement and no blocs (something that feels very far from the current UN influence in the newly antagonistic US/China world) is itself a place of climate crisis immigration, growing inequality, raptorial capitalism, prisons and joblessness.
Naomi in one of the most beautiful and painful scenes of the show
High G Emotions
I found myself completely swayed by this series which from the very beginning was not about ‘pew-pew’ but about step by step complex developments and negotiations in almost impossible situations and for further than your planetary or asteroid mining – goals. From the first scenes, wearing magnetic boots – gravity and outer space life has felt palpable. I am usually get very emotionally involved with movies, but it has been a long time since I have been as much affected by a series (to tears). The Expanse has managed to do that for me. Some have commented on the pessimistic tone – of the later 6th season (just being screened). While I am feeling pretty harsh about Amazon Corp picking up from Syfy channel and making it theirs and also pushing this Belter terrorist Red-Brigade-RAF platitude to the max, I also trust J S A Corey’s friendly but firm grip on it:
Oh I disagree. Humanity still existing in a couple hundred years is feeling REALLY optimistic to me right now. https://t.co/zRCrDZG4Ql
It is not a SF ‘weepy’ (which I would gladly watch) – there is a lot of hearfelt encounters that feel very close now to early conditions now that much of solidarity is done online, and much of what comes from climate summits is really disheartening and ludicrous (no concerted action and ineffectual politicians). There is a lot to be learn just following Chrisjen Avasarala (magnificently played by Shohreh Aghdashloo – also known for her roles in Abbas Kiarostami’s films), Secretary-General of the United Nations. As on and off Secretary-General she serves as the head of state and government of Earth and chief executive of the United Nations (UN). I find her development arc more interesting than let’s say Filip- Marco Inaro’s son. She basically starts like your run-of-the-mill War on Terror – CIA operative organizing black site type Gravity torture or Obama drone warfare support against revolting Belters. In politics and in contrast with a lot of recent US presidents, Avasarala is definitely not a war hawk. I refuse to see The Expanse as Games of Thrones in space, since this would again push a neo-feudal outlook, and what I prefer is a historically grounded development not these supposedly ‘human nature’ – or ‘eternal concers’. She, i think also changes during the series, and ends up preferring negotiations, opening channels and is always in a sort of counter-intelligence war with her own military arm, that seems to try and escalate and retaliate on each occasion.
gravity torture
Another incredible character is Camina Drummer (played by Canadian actress Cara Gee) that comes trough as a very tough and incredible determined Belter that is torn between her allegiance to the emancipatory cause of the Belters and the OPA and her vengeful actions towards testo male leader Marco Inaros. She is one of the most enduring and critical characters of the whole – she is always potrayed in a complex way that makes her (for me) a sort of emblem of the whole series.
Brand New Cherry Flavor is an American horrordramastreaming television limited series created by Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, based on the novel of the same name by Todd Grimson.
dark, zany and shape shifting
Probably my favorite series of the last few years and one of the best Netflix experiences of the early 21 century. It might come as no surprise that this is not the usual science fiction pean – nor a radically new expression of our times, but a more modest retro tribute to 1990s body genre cinema. Not many horrors nowadays can provide such an enticing mix of grotesqueries, artificiality, comedy, x-ploitation with such panache!
It also stars what might turn out to be one of the most amazing young actresses of these end-times: Canadian-American Rosa Salazar. Salazar channels both bare knuckles, no frills, to the bitter end attitude with everything that we might regard as going-down-the-drain/doomer/crap-I-did-it-again black hole we find ourselves in.
Plenty of good, recent lists of movies take on the celeb path to destruction-perdition (or monstrous transformation into something else). The nascent, young female horror movie director turns out to be the worst nightmare of its sleazeball, libidinous, profiteering male producers or hapless boyfriends and arrogant actors. Hollywood/LA is since (1950) Sunset Boulevard the festering noir Babylon of cinematography, but also a vice-den full of vengeful aging yet still respledent and haunting superstars. Recent horrors have been turning a lot of these powerful early examples on their head somehow. InStarry Eyes– directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, a young starlet (Alexandra Essoe) gets targeted by the (unsurprisingly demonic) Hollywood elite and suffers the most horrific and non-beatific shapeshifting.
there is no exit only the kitchen sink
Becoming a female star or a female director is almost like a satanist ritual or a serial killer praxis. In I blame society (2020) writer/director Gillian Wallace Horvat, uses furious irony to lacerate an omnipresent and condescending patriarchal ‘bro’ culture, too secure (and dumb) to notice how it is producing its own nemesis. A male world full of obnoxious fantasies that keeps denying female authors/directors all due recognition, respect etc. +authorship. This is not rotten to the core, it is just insufferable and blind. That is why it is swallowing the allergic sandwich, the poisoned hook, or gets butchered or ritually maimed on its own self-congratulating altar. Most of the time you will learn to root for the female director no matter what – since the situation as we know and knew even before MeeToo is pretty dire. Method acting in a male-dominated cinematic world imposes more and more bizarre contortions and transformations that never end well or with a tadah- a happy ending.
the sweltering apartment jungle
Back to Brand New Cherry Flavor – where Lisa N. Nova (Rosa Salazar) – a young horror film director enters a netherworld of sex magick, ruthless body snatching, ancient Amazonian lore, witchcraft infused transformative vendetta with plenty of unsuspected zombie voodoo/hoodoo spells. There are newborn kittens everywhere getting vomited and there is a vine growing from the ceiling of a building and hallucinatory brain worms are harvested from its pollen. All this and more awaits the unsuspecting traveler. The horrific – in Linda William’s 1991 body genre’s critical essay (melodrama, porn, horror) usually gets the ‘gross’ label attached, where blamed bodily excess on-screen somehow lets viewers be affected in the most sensationalistic and visceral ways, making detachment impossible and affects hard to deny or to refuse. One of the repeating patterns is Lisa N. Nova’s both horrific and completely ridiculous vomiting live blind kittens that usually get snatched right away. There is this sensation that everything averted might turn out to be even more horrific. When she tries to rewrite the kitten-birthing pact, her body manages to reroute the process. Processes (magical or not) have a life of their own. Kittens start exiting other parts of her body – this is all happening under the most plausible, bodily exhausting, and sticky embarrassing situations.
the debt of kittens
The movie is both eerie, both dark and colorful (cherry flavored?!) at the same time. There is this boring cliche of horror wearing its awfully drab garment proudly – full of dry red, black blood, dressed in mourning colors and hues. Brand New Cherry Flavor is anything but monochrome. In fact, it is best described as being luxuriant. It luxuriates (plot-wise also) with jungle entanglements plants and animals.
patching and changing skins
Although tarantulas and orchids have a long history in noir movies and horror trash, they did not get joined as a related (imported) ecosystem of horrors. This I find the greatest addition of BNCF to the Sunset Boulevard haunted decaying canon of silent star era mansions. It is the undeniable fact that that there might be a hothouse out there, full of exotics and a spirit world in the basement. A tropical taxonomy of non-typical growth amidst perfect preened lawns and green acres. The whole series and its characters are almost like generating their own tendrils, acting out their darkly vitalistic nature, like infesting, seductive invasive species brought onboard some crates of lingering, unwatched movie copies that got buried under production hell. Suffice to say music is also right on top.
there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book
I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.
I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.
Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one. Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm. Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference. The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.
In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless). We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such. He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:
Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.
TimeSpace Warps 