“Adam and Will are joined by Professor Steven Shaviro to discuss his work on the philosophy of science fiction, developing on themes from recent texts such as Extreme Fabulations and 2016’s Discognition out on Repeater Books. We asked Steven about the various techniques that writers such as Frank Herbert, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and China Mieville to unearth possible futures in the present; and how they extrapolate from, speculate upon, and generate fables about dominant tendencies of our political and technological situation. We also touched upon philosophies of time and narrative such as Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, and Darko Suvin.”
This week’s podcast is “Objects and Values of Labor in Socialist Hungary,” the second in REEES Fall Series Socialism: Past, Present, and Future.
Guest:
Martha Lampland is a Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She’s the author of two books The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary and The Value of Labor. The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956 both published by the University of Chicago Press.
In short, i found extremely valuable this granular analysis of ways to calculate, measure and valorize labor in Hungary, altough I do not agree on all accounts, I consider this anthropological study of longue duree agrarian trends very enlightening. Thanks to the anonymous suggestion of DS for their generous link sharing. Beside her field work in and around the transitional period towards market economy from planned economy in Hungary, her emphasis on the processual as different from merely historical approach I found fundamental. Answering the Why by How and finding out not just how things come to pass, but how things transform into something else. She links two very different transition points – the move towards Stalinism in late 40s Hungary and the transition towards market economy after 1989. None where quick, none where clean brakes and she makes them part of a larger modernist project of rationalization and efficiency that crosses ideological barriers or theories of labour. She traces such increasing commodification to the early big landowners, their increasing entry into world markets where they had to start measuring closer and closer how could be optimized in order to stay competitive. These developments get hauled during collectivization and scientific management technics that ironically are easier to study in the former East than West. Socialism is still an integral part of the modernist project. She also talks about ‘caloric money’, or food intake that is payed during the war in relation to the calculated amount of labour. The factories dossiers in Chicago or Detroit are much harder to research since they are private institutions, so the way scientific management was implemented remains opaque.
Value and labour theory of value (Marxist ltv) are separate things that I am wrapping my head around. Value theory or importance is central to William James, as well as Whitehead if I get that, although they have a different, more naturalistic, situational (with cosmological implications) understanding of value that does not get resumed under human economic systems. Yet value inside the organismic thought is deeply relational, is a result of webs of interactions happening in time like in Marxism (what Marx called socially necessary labor time). The two cultural and social necessary labor time should be separated and usually social turns out to be cultural on certain accounts. The radical empiricism of James, his contribution to philosophy entails a very different value theory, a non-calculative value, where entire organisms (think of leaves, flowers etc) are expressions of valuation or expressions of processes of valorization, of what is of importance for that plant, mushroom, bug, of what is important for that particular organism at that particular moment in time, without necessarily accounting or closing in on it. In fact Whitehead’s theory of value (he as a professional mathematician) is situational it depends and is part and partial to the concreteness of an unfolding situation. In his metaphysics value occupies a central place – both in ethics and aesthetics (of which ethics is just a small subset). For him ‘intensity’ is most probably the only one variable that we can gauge experience with.
Martha Lampland also mentions a book – about labor value in different European schools of thought (see below). In fact she traces the genealogy of LTV to a specific German strain and further to Betriebswissenschaftlehre a particular culturally defined way in which labour was valorized in German speaking countries as opposed to the English or American school of commodifying or measuring labour. In fact this cultural analysis of conceptual context traces Marx’s understanding to the German way of understanding or measuring labour in terms of energy, of thermodynamics which brings me to the Natural Philosophers and the way dynamic powers are foregrounded. Inversely in other traditions of valorizing labor such as the Anglo-American, labour is a product, it is focused on the finite product, the finite objects. Even if they had the same technologies or competed in the same markets, these two departures show how important various (national) cultural context are in shaping economic concepts or the very categories of economic life.
Perhaps sensitized by Carlo Rovelli’s last book Helgoland: The World of Quantum Theory – here was an occasion to see how cinema would deal with the infinite copies of yourselves, taking the preposterous strangeness of Schrödinger theory seriously, by pushing it to its extremes. What could be well enjoyed as just another memory addled guilt-trip into young adulthood or nostalgia for college years, could as well be treated as a more philosophical trippy endeavor into ‘potentiality’ and ‘actualization’ (important A N Whitehead’s terms for process philosophy as well as various quantum theory interpretations). I am currently reading the Romanian translation of Religion in the Making by Whitehead, published in 1926, only one year after the momentous trip Heisenberg took to the lonely (and Pollen free!) island in the North Sea where he started to see the matrix mechanics taking shape from his math tables. This book is the only Romanian (ANW) translation I’ve found and probably one that most current Whiteheadians would skip, yet I found it rich in hints that his generally realist & naturalist metaphysics (&theology!) had also somehow absorbed the shock of quantum realities (and general relativity). In part, it’s almost as if even at his most ‘theological’, he offers living proof that one cannot ignore the latest results or skip the consistent questions raised by these tested and re- tested theories and permit a mindset that is ready to welcome the rattling & shaking of everything we thought we knew about the world. Even if completly remote from our daily lives, there’s this increasing ‘remote – close’ familiarity with the pleasurable absurdity of quantum theory interpretations, not in the preposterous quack “quantum therapies” (Rovelli also ridicules) but in its cultural or even aesthetic implements or speculative wagers.
First, I do not think one has to dabble in quantum theory speculations – or even pretend to do, in order to actually make such a movie or profess to intuit far flung influence. A lot of current good SF work is rich in diverting the fallout of quantum theoretical enrichment into pop adventures (even sexual proclivity in Sex Criminals comics where the protagonists freeze time during multiple orgasms), without lecturing or without even pointing fingers towards specific ‘favorite’ interpretations of it (take ur pick!). I think that Occupy by Tricia Sullivan offers the golden standard here. It is very intimately entangled (no pun!). Building a constructively hallucinatory experience, concerned with transmitting the ‘living through’ and delving into extraordinary examples of ‘wave functions’ and ‘collapsing the wave function’. As a inter dimensional being one switches first, second person to third person all in one, getting across what it might be to actually to live in a universe with higher dimensions or higher realities. The POW is still there, even if it always hovers as if it continuoiusly splits and gets twisted along those realities. What is best is that it is clearly T Sullivan isnot interested in the slightest in delineating technical details or getting bogged down in explanatory gaps.
What appears to be a drug-induced non-linearity (which it could well be), in Flashback movie aka the Edu of…. branches off into a “many worlds” interpretation (unmentioned in the frame of the movie!), where each “I” separates or exists simultaneously with all the others, each with its own branched world”. Although one could even say slow motion doubling, tripling etc would be a better visual characterization. There is a plethora of other recent movies that deal with multiple selves, but rather than making it a psychological (medicalized) multi-personality disorder, or claiming some sort of karmic or reincarnation multiplicity, Flashback makes these versions of a very slippery self all unnerving & ontologically real. Moving in repetitive and discontinuous (quite scarry) jumps enables one to move into various other existences, without renouncing the stable (boring) initial one. Ontologic surprises are not explainable just via substances, although substances are always a good way to start or to question. There is always the possibility that reality and memory is actually rich in staining those branching worlds, that these worlds are multifarious, and that there is always a sense of ‘out there’ enjoyment of all the missing splendor or decrepitude of this multiverse concretness. So even if I think Rovelli has a point about keeping the brambles of many worlds at a minimum and focusing on the infinite relations out here that make our world so vaporous and enticing, there is always a slippage. Affect, missing opportunities and unrequited love might also be a good guide among the various worlds.
Probability is not just probability but a gigantic real ψ wave in this movie. Carlo Rovelli is critical of this many world quantum theory interpretation on grounds of how it denies our own observable experiences of only one “I”, not its double, not its multiple (unless just as multiple personality disorder I guess). Yet, at the same time I would also say there is some sort of mixture going on, according to the process metaphysics there is always some concrescence solidarity of multiplicities going on haywire, with a more promiscuous now that is (always) being smeared or holding on the non temporal residue of what it could have been, or what never is, or what did not take place temporally. These atmospherics of the possible (according to a Whiteheadian scheme) are always, already part of each actualisation. The newly weds room of boxes is an apt reminder that in the current worst of worst worlds sold as best of, other realities, ‘many worlds’ become few, with less and less options and better left unboxed. Or who knows what might come out (Trump II? Another mutant Covid strain?), since clearly there’s no end to the worst case scenario and even easy cheapo escapisms have become impossibilties for a large majority.
What is a slow burn of a college love and various mysterious happenings, flashbacks, encounters, timeline and discontinuities built up into something quite remarkable in my view – an actual warped construction, cinematically speaking, of what it is to feel like one is dripping into some larger phenomenological reality that we can actually observe via the movie effects and the edits on screen. The non linear editing I found quiet elaborate and surprisingly unsettling and atmospheric. One has the feel there is also some monstrous selves out there, a sort of inchoate awakening. The college love is herself an incredibly guide into this larger, more generous reality that dangerously announces also some social and cultural precipes, of several lives lived, of turning points, of actual and very hellish limbos. The limbo aspect I found intersting – in one sense a very satisfying even if very cliché squatter hell of drug addled abandoned houses, but at the same time (from capitalist realist standpoint) one that is full of nasty surprises and literally the only divergence from the usual family-job-home ownership trajectory.
This I found very enticing – the exploration of an observable point of view, of ‘loosership’ as it is presented or constructed under capitalism, neoliberalism, call it what u want, achievement etc SAT scores. More and more of the young generation, including the gaokao exams in China and titles like “Scores Don’t Mean Security, Money Does”. Disappointing job offers (already well fused with life possibilities) in both US and China point to a certain expenditure of potentials, or of being handed out a lack of perspective in tge midst of general prosperity. Perspectival metaphysics takes this reality at heart – making ones own intersubjective perspective definitory in a way that does not slip into the old subjectivist or idealist trappings of the absolute point of view from nowhere. In a way, if we are to follow Carlo Rovelli’s last book and his relations RQM (Relational Quantum Mechanics), the way things ARE or appear, so long as they interact or intersect.
Found quite funny the stereotypical artist lifeline – the way he renounces his artistic creative side, a critical point, since creativity is completely commodified and remade into some sort of data mining or dreary pattern recognition job. It is ridiculous how such dreams of artistic life haunt the current lack of perspective – it is almost as when everything is artistic, when every ad and online advert animations involves lots of creativity one dreams of the 19th century painter with an atelier, a sort of displaced image of the creative, out of a job, the Romantic image of the 1950s US An American in Paris sort of trope that was already old at the time. Also this perspective no-perspective of an angsty, white hetero male tends to suck big time, I said it before and I will say it again. At the same time, I am in accord with Rovelli that one should always admit quantum strangeness in our vacuous midst, at the core of the slipstream cultural pop universe, under all forms and all shapes.
[[Was not able to jot down my thoughts on it, but that time has finally come. If I am to agree with other reviewers, I would have to keep a blind eye to my own abysmal editing of Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. So no complaints about typos. Good that I cannot or will not review my own book. I am all for systematicity, since my own instincts struggle with it and yet most of the time trying to find a clear path among the ferocious brambles of speculative theory fiction/SF fabulation defeats the purpose. I enjoyed the lacunae as well as the conceptual splits, nor was I deranged by an overwrought style, with my own checkered past and unnecessary terminological excess in mind.]]
So, “Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life”, a slim 80+ page volume, is worthwhile reading. More of an extended essay, and even out of Corona context, it’s a welcome mindfuck. It arrived in 2012, Ben Woodard’s tome is an early ZerO Books snapshot, born in the throes of new materialism, OOO, the ontological turn, a new appetite for metaphysics, speculative realism & horror of philosophy (one has to dig deeper into Jane Bennett, Meillasoux, Negarestani, Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Nicola Masciandaro, Steven Shaviro and others). It is prescient in its embrace of the putrescent & contagious and all things ‘biological’ that came to rule our quarantined days. It is biophilosophical as such and not just a tract on the philosophy of biological. Coming out of the various strains of non-correlationist thinking, it is an early, formative publication by a contemporary thinker whose involvement with natural history keeps on tracking conceptual clusters & updating a philosophy that kept itself too long at bay from evolving biological ideas. B Woodard’s texts are unavoidable for anybody interested even rhe slightest in these things. It makes a good untimely visit (or revisit) now, especially after the hype over ‘speculative realism’ is generally over.
On two accounts I consider Ben Woodard’s work important. First, from the standpoint of his familiarity and embrace of a whole plethora of weird and new weird literature, his unapologetic and almost relentlessly geeky – sticky ontological (?!) attitude towards all sorts of dirty media, no matter how remote trashy, be it over -theorized or not expunged from the canon. Secondly, these dumpster ‘horrorisms’ (from gaming, horror B movies fare, comics etc) are being stalked in a shambling lock-step by a whole gamut of Continental philosophy and Naturphilosophie + (more recently) ungainly(for me) and undigestible oddities such as the British Idealists. This includes a monography (which does not seem to be out yet, although finished) situating Francis Herbert Bradley at the very origins of that primordial split of Analytic vs Continental schools via monism & pluralism.
The Creep of Life – takes a cue both from Negarestani as well as Stephen J Gould. I must say I never read Cyclonopedia by Negarestani, although his influence has been nearly ubiquitous in many quarters & given the proper treatment elsewhere, while for me S J Gould has been important on a personal level. He’s a truly formative influence on some of my earliest biological and natural history musings, so I’m always curious about any potential Gouldian cross overs. I was keen on a work that promises to juxtapose these incompatible, maybe even incompossible forces. Woodard’s ‘Dark Vitalism’ – is a child of both lovecraftian radical openness (in fact he makes Lovecraft feel quite coy) toward unbearable outside dimensions (apud Negarestani). A radical opening that invites invasiveness, quartering, fostering and hosting the alien – as well as taking full advantage of how systematically Darwinism dispels any trace of human excepționalism & sense of purpose. Even a radical contingency as that of Meillasoux, the non-teleological keeps a lingering anthropocentrism, so Woodard makes sure any taxonomic superiority and upper level inevitability has to go. Evolutionary replays will not end up with the same or any kind of intelligence valorizing biped, math or no math. Against any vertebrate-centric or multicellular-centric view, S Gould, a Marxist paleontologist & naturalist, kept encouraging these views from the below – always disdainful & ridiculing our airs of superiority in regard to ‘humble’ Monera. This ‘low’ bacterial dimension, a planetary microbiome that extends in all directions, became protoplasmic base reality (something else than just the impeding doom of pathogenicity) -moving slowly into quorum sensing limelight, one that Gould would have undoubtedly recognized.
For Woodard the critical distance from strict adaptionism, Panglossian radical selectionism & selfish genocentrism peddled by the neo-Darwinian apostles (prominently Richard Dawkins), germinates what S J Gould seeded, stemming from a vast, historically grounded encyclopedic knowledge of evolutionary ideas, humanism & many byways of natural history amd geology + making sure many racist pseudo-sciences & faulty methodologies don’t get a second chance (phrenology, IQ testing etc that informed eugenic immigration policies in the US etc). This prepares one for tackling any socio biological vagaries, whatever one-sided Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge epistemic fraternization might promise us, or whatever circular ‘just so’ stories of the day might become institutionalized as evolutionary psychology trivia.
Slime Dynamics does not trace all this, and maybe better so, since it is tracking some more rare, viscous and opaque protoplasm – the one that tends to be avoided even by the best of biologically- literate philosophers (the usual French suspects: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze). It is as if thinking about living thought gets obscured, killed at birth, muddled whenever brought down in the mud it came from, just the minute it gets reminded where its mindfulness oozes from.
In a time of lacking transparency, of dodgy accountability, when black-boxed (and quite racistic) AIs become existential threats and discrimination machines, this ‘darkness’ might seem completely out of tune. Corona Pandemics, fake news, and G Agamben letters of biopolitical conservatism, ‘dark vitalism’ itself feels somewhat unnecessary, an exaggerated – Lebensphilosophical – mystification. Yet ‘darkness’ – does not equal obscurantist add-ons to obfuscate even more & multiply misunderstandings, or inflame anti-scientific pathos with more or less misplaced mistrust in sometimes imperfect yet badly needed biomedical advances. First things first, Slime Dynamics is steeped in the purposelessness of evolutionary drift, it is abiogenesis – friendly even when discussing outrageous panspermia, and it is clearly familiar with experiments/scientific theories or the historical significance of discovering deep time. This possibility to think beyond the biotic dimension & into unthinking anorganic origins of life keeps on overflowing, forever unsettling our relation to pure data & mere science reports. Slime Dynamics always enjoys using biologically informed horror in order to both update & degrade philosophy and dissolve the anti-biology inhibitors that have plagued phenomenology and Continental or Critical thought in general. It ultimately takes the obscene results and cool research data of science to their ultimate, unflattering devastating conclusions. In order to dispel this ‘darkness’ of the dark I am quoting the threefold aspects that Ben Woodard attributes to this new (deep time inflected) mostly unwanted vitalism:
“1. It is dark because it is obscured both by nature (who is to say that we can divine and comprehend the details of the universe from our limited brains) and by time (we are at a temporal disadvantage in trying to discern the creation of all things) since the cause of most of the nature we know has fallen back into the deep past.
2. It is dark because it spells bad news for the human race in terms of our origins (we are just clever monkeys that emerged as a result of a series of biological and cosmological lucky breaks), our meaning (we are just meat puppets based on our construction), and our ultimate fate (Earth will die and we will probably perish if not with it then eventually with the universe).
3. It is dark on an aesthetic and experiential level our psychosocial and phenomenological existence is darkened and less friendly to us, and our perceptions, given the destructiveness of time and space.”BW
Viruses and epidemiology play an important place in Slime Dynamics and spell out some of the most unsettling truths we have since come to loath, but can never ever again ignore (with the inception/global expanse of the Corona Pandemic). It is almost too close to home now that a very simple event of disease spillover, of outside contagion teaches us something the hard way about either complexity or basic simplicity – that medical under-development and patent trolling brings under capitalism.
Mushrooms and the fungoid also play an important role in Slime Dynamics, and I might say this is my favorite part since most of the newer The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins valuable additions tend to skip the central disgust associated with the undergrowth, the eminently -putrescient- slithering of hyphae or even the unavoidable weird (speculative lit) aspects that subtend it. In particular, space-time for Woodard is always warped along fungal apparitions – contrasting it with the networked contagion (“time overcoming space), the amorphousness and formlessness of fungal life is that of “the spatial overcoming time”, dragging life below ground, making it reliant upon down-trodden, plentiful disaggregation, dependent on the inorganic.
Slime Dynamics comes as good critical reminder of classical (altough contemporary xenobiology seems to have evolved) teleological attachments, its unimaginative program of ‘intelligent’ contact out there, its ignorance of the extremophilic non sapient possibilities out here. Slime Dynamics makes a fungus thriving inside a Chernobyl sarcophagus a much better candidate for sentient alien contact at home as well as outside of the bounds of our evolutionary bland & stationary ‘pinnacle’ position. I think Naturphilosophie has waited much too long for a comeback, and that J G Fichte and F W J Schelling in their liminal situation btw Kant and Hegel may act like a philosophic slime-mold, a composite multi-phase creature or answer to the Kantian-Blumenbachian program that can be many things at once, or one unified thing at different times. Slime Dynamics takes an important cue from H Grant making Nature After F W J Schelling as contemporary a thing as any nowadays, not just by mere retro recovery but by extending & activating ‘power metaphysics’ overall. Ben Woodard is well able to critically siphon out any romantic excess of Schelling – without jettisoning the precedence Schelling gave to base nature over thinking, as well as him being well aware of how intelligence (or better sapience) has been preserved apart from an inescapable basic materiality that keeps clinging to our angel wings. A clinging hodologic mucus not be confused with a pre-packaged and regurgitated as fixed ‘human nature’. A neo-Schellingian vibe lures our attention towards the net forces operating on environments, bodies and especially on thought as explored by another relatively forgotten German Naturphilosoph – Kielmeyer. Schelling is critical of vitalism because of his aesthetic romantic leanings, because ‘vitalism’ per se seems to entail something contradictory to him, almost feet in the sky, unopposed by any equal force, just forever exhaustive matter. Schelling thus appears to have been priming us for ‘dissipative structures’ – for riding vortices as the Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine thaught us. Maybe we have here the same ‘aesthetic’ engagement that seriously considered totality as a conjunction of opposing forces, of intensities & contrasts also vital in – A N Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, as he also came to appreciate the Romantics, beside his interest in metaphysics & history of science. To me, although Whitehead never mentions any specific German Naturphilosoph but only their British poet- adepts, he seems to qualify ‘eternal darkness’ in manner quite close to Schelling as “an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond”.
What i miss from Woodard’s examples are maybe hints of an eastern ex Socialist SF slime – as the DDR movie Der Schweigende Stern 1960 loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Astronauts. During the the shoots it apparently used up the whole country’s whole supply of glue. These tons of glue were used to simulate a post apocalyptic Venusian surface. This civilizational residue of muck overflows everything, a preview warning of the ultimate no-return extinction, if we would choose to follow the same path of megadeath militarism & weaponized science.
But let’s see how Woodard keeps on smearing ardently cleaned paths from this history of philosophy with a necessary creepiness that is of great benefit, so I better leave him the last word:
“The material being of humans, and of all life is a slimy one. Slime is the smudge of reality, the remainder and reminder of the fact that things fall apart. The shining path of humanity is only ever the verminous – like the trail of our own oozing across time and space – the trace and proof of our complete sliminess trough and trough.”BW
Swarming , extra-dimensional or extra-galactic organicisms and entities mentioned by Ben Woodards in his book Slime Dynamics:
Tyranods pf Warhammer 40,000 mentioned by Woodard in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
“The Tyranids are an alien race from the colds depths of the void that hunger constantly for warm flesh. They infest the stars in their billions, a raw force of destruction that has been likened to a locust swarm”
Zerg of Starcraft also mentioned in Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
screen capture of Zerg swarm from Starcraft
“Zerg Swarm is a terrifying and ruthless amalgamation of biologically advanced, arthropodal aliens. Dedicated to the pursuit of genetic perfection, the zerg relentlessly hunt down and assimilate advanced species across the galaxy, incorporating useful genetic code into their own.”
8472 Species of Star Trek also mentioned in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
the chapter on Extra-Galactic Terror also mentions “The Yuuzhan Vong—Children of Yun-Yuuzhan, also called the Chosen Race, known to the Chiss and Ferroans as the Far Outsiders, and sometimes incorrectly abbreviated to Vong (which implied that one was disowned by their family and their gods)—were a nomadic extra-galacticsentientspecies that nearly destroyed the New Republic, and were responsible for the deaths of nearly 365 trillion sentient beings during their invasion of the galaxy.”
Ubbo-Sathla, Ubbo-Sathla a short story by Clark Ashton Smith, originally published in 1933, also known as The Unbegotten Source or The Demiurge, is an Outer God which features in the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos. Art by infernvs
“colossal mass of protoplasmic goo, Ubbo-Sathla is a creature which has dwelt on Earth since its formation. Constantly spewing forth a plethora of primitive organisms, some believe that this creature was the source of all life on the planet, and that one day it will emerge to re-absorb all of its biomass.” source Monster wiki
TimeSpace Warps 