A remarkable trip to the universe of what was to become the Royal Society. A few cursory notes -are how diverse the preoccupations at the time were, and how studying Saturn went very well with studying or perfecting ways to better draw and analyze fleas and flies. The microcosms were in many ways much closer and more accessible than the macrocosmos – and at the time all optics and telescopes were so poor as to make optical aberrations, errors, and mistakes unavoidable. The universe itself was quite small, and distances were not properly understood, still C. Wren had tremendous fun trying to figure out the surface of the moon and make a model of it. Another example was the temper and gracious nature of Wren – who compared with many other researchers, then and now, was very uninterested in tying his name to a discovery or really an influencer that did not strive to be an influencer.
A very good introduction to the history of astronomy, ethics in science, and the pleasure of discovery, even when one does not have the proper tools or the best of conditions.
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).
This keynote lecture brings together research and books by other authors, be it cyber-feminist or digital culture – a different history of computing, biding carefully and imaginatively together old and new material practices that subtend computation (by XX women artists let’s say or adopted from specific work done by indigenous people) as a common weave of ‘uncomputable’ computer history.
In a sense he is just tying together several knots and threads, adding more to wider web of inclusive and non-reductionist histories of (unconventional) computing. There is an incredible visible and tangible built-up that made computing happen starting from down below. One that allows us to better feel and understand that it could not exist without this processual practices. An instantiated (and mostly underrated and unwaged) work specific to all sorts of weaving process – from childhood games such as Cat’s Cradle (Donna Haraway) to DNA molecular folding. Textile art and textile production for a long time considered ‘minor’ arts and ‘decorative’ (even inside men preserves such as Bauhaus) – are taken as better examples of parsing both industrial history and understanding mathification in various other ways than just visiting your local computer museum or technical museum. Here are a few rapid notes on it:
-on the way it discusses both the work of early industrial weavers, the worker’s own resistance and distraction of machines as boycott against automation and the ‘intellectual’ aesthetic critic against pieces (observations by Lord Byron) made in the new factories as opposed to the previous handicraft work. New lower quality work coming out of these early factories was disconsidered and called in the day’s cant: ‘spider work’.
-early employers preferring married women as workers since they would be more docile, and more ready to give everything in order to provide for their families (a quote from Marx that quotes an early social reformer.
-the way Ada Lovelace largely considered the first programmer – at the same time (as Sadie Plant has pointed out in 1997) the context of her ground braking mathematical work is as telling as the work itself (if not more for non-mathematical minds as mine), it is an addenda to a proto-vapourware, an annex written by a women to a footnote of a translated review from Italian about the first “computer” – a machine thought by Charles Babbage (the Analytical engine in his words), but that did not yet exist!
-a very nice example of fraying of margins, of falling apart. This is no smooth or continuous and unaltered history. It follows the same way carpets or woven products get most intense friction or use at the margins. There is I think a long-standing interest of AR Galloway in the role of error, of the glitch in programming and the way all these proto-computers were always incredibly noisy, clunky and prone to failure all the time and had to be always rebooted or debugged from early on.
-the way spiders interpret or percieve any improvement to their work (as in the work of the artist Nina Katchadourian was mending damaged spider webs) as something unwanted, an event that actually made them come and extract the ‘repaired part’ and continue with their own work
“Narrating a series of lesser-known historical episodes, Alexander R. Galloway’s keynote lecture addresses the computable and uncomputable. These stories are drawn from the archives of computation and digital media, broadly conceived. The goal is to show how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fraying and falling apart. Such alternations–something done something undone, something computed, something uncomputed–constitute the real history of digital machines, from cybernetics and networks to cellular automata and beyond. And while computers have colonized the globe in recent years they also excel at various practices of exclusion. Since the 1970s “protocol” technologies have played a key role in this transformation. Galloway concludes with an interrogation of the concept of protocol in 2020, revisiting his groundbreaking 2004 book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.”(VLC Forum 2020 description)
“Individuality is a key concept in human societies. How we define individuals and their boundaries affects our social relations, what kind of rights and duties we have, as well as when we are considered healthy or sick. In all these realms, the biological side of humans’ individuality – the organism – plays a crucial role. Currently, after many decades dominated by the paradigm of the gene, the concept of organism is making a comeback in the bio- and biomedical sciences. The organism is again recognized as a causally efficacious, autonomous, and active unit that transcends the properties of genes – especially in fields like epigenetics, niche construction theory, and evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo).
This project investigates these recent developments from a perspective of integrated history and philosophy of science. It focuses on (i) biotheoretical and conceptual, (ii) historical, as well as (iii) social and anthropological dimensions of today’s ‚return of the organism‘. Especially, it aims at offering solutions for theoretical and societal challenges of organism-centered biosciences in the 21st century. This concerns the problem, (i) that while organisms are increasingly recognized as agents that actively construct their own development and their environments, large genomic datasets also reveal that they are inextricable linked with and fully embedded in their material and social environment. This ambiguous new character of the individual – to stand out and at the same time to disappear – leads to various methodological and explanatory challenges in the biosciences. This complex current situation can better be understood (ii) when compared to periods in the history of biology, especially in the early 20th century, in which the organism emerged as a central unit in biology. In order to identify the relevant conceptual debates and the solutions they offer with respect to today’s challenges, archival research is combined with methods of text mining. Finally, this project investigates (iii) how current individualistic and anti-individualistic developments in biology drive trends in personalized medicine and public health debates. This includes, first, novel responsibilities of individuals as self-determined health care agents, but also new worries about social heteronomy. Second, the ambiguous status of the organism stirs debates about suitable targets of policy interventions – individuals or collectives (e.g., social and ethnic groups) – to combat diseases such as cancer and obesity. This includes the biomedical trend to return to racial classifications for studying disease susceptibilities of environmentally embedded individuals.”
I read Clifford D. Simak’s 1970 Out of their Minds in its Heyne Verlag German 1971 edition (translated by Birgit Ress-Bohusch). A trashy sleeve with properly garish art by C. A. M Thole: a small blurry red convertible (a Matchbox-sized vehicle) is being threatened or burped by huge fiery looking winged dragon and a ludicrously huge demonic creature with a red fluttering cape. The demon almost looks surprise about what is about to happen in front on him. The German title “Verteufelte Welt” (more like Bedeviled World or Infernal, Devilish World) does not really help to attract more attention from its readers. The appeal to Christian demonology or Satanist plots, sects etc falls short. The following is an attempt to see how and why Out of Their Minds takes further all the recent discussions about tulpomancy, meme magic, ‘thought-forms’, egregores etc As to why all this perilous policing about various intrusions(escapes?) from the imaginary worlds into our own. Minds – locates the human mind as the major culprit and by extension only the human central nervous system (head) as a laboratory of the mind. I think here we have our difficulty dealing with something else than the imagination of certain portion of a certain species (even mindfulness apps are still not full because they are very selective in how they locate minds and place them only into overworked westerner skulls). We live in a lively (and deadly) exciting time where minds (and imagination by extension), reason (as Moynihan puts in his X-Risk “To realize that reason was at risk was also to realize that reason just is the ability to risk new ways of seeing the world”) jeopardize various other settled opinions about what minds are and how mind came to be. The evolution of all sorts of minds seem only partially settled inside the cranial case spacewhen we consider that there is all these minds that are not encased, that developed inside non-skeletal, non-vertebrate, ‘soft’ underwater bodies (especially thinking about certain convergent trends within Metazoa multicellular evolution – multicellular minds that would ecompass both vertebrate and non-vertebrates – Peter-Godfrey Smith is a good place to start).
Clifford D Simak’s book has a much wider scope imho beside the most obvious one: the dangers of wishing or calling imaginary things (not excluding various very helpful abstractions) into reality and overcoming the ill-effects of such releases into the world, effects that have a tendency to get externalized on others (*least protected). More importantly there is an ambiental, environmental sense of these intrusions – where nobody seems to be immune to these intrusions). Nowadays it is almost impossible to ignore this simple fact. There are many good takes on why so many of these self-fulfilling hypermediated prophecies are at work all around us. At the same time the most obvious (so as to be ignored) is maybe that such intrusions have stopped being the obscure realm of mere specialists (philosophers, futurologists, cultural critics, cognitivists, media gurus, technoshamans etc). Almost everyone is part and parcel of it, at we can agree that we are all the time being exposed to various disruptive fictions and for-profit imagineering/innovation.
So this becomes a common task – to see why and how this hardcore ontological oscillation plays out and where does it lead us. The spillover has not only been the fact that a lot of imageeneering has always been employed and involved (thinking how Scifi writers in Japan have been involved in World Exhibtions in the 1070s), but since Sept 11 at least, different imagineering efforts (I use this both in it’s devious Disney sense as well as a general term for cognitive labour) from professionals (be it the movie industry Ridley Scott – Pentagon Pentagon interactions etc or known postcyberpunkers such as Neal Stephenson consultancy for Blue Origin/Bezos sub-orbital spaceflight company) etc have been directly employed by governments and the private sector to lot out future catastrophist scenarios. The miltiary-entertainment continuum would go so far as to even endow a certain cinematic aspect to all preemptive action against various so-called ‘rogue states’ or even allow for institutionalizing our current 6th Extinction via X-risk imagining and management. Imagination does not create or speculate in a vacuum, it is a way to bridge the gulfs btw the stars. It allows flights-of-imagination where there is no data available or even a sort of feed forward that can call upon elements of sensibility that lie beyond perceptual consciousnesses, and even allow for things that can estrange us, delight, entrance or heighten our lives or express what has become unthinkable or unreachable nowadays.
Why is this book on top on my obligatory ‘imaginary ecosystems’ reading list? I will not do a regular review of the book or try to bring it into the orbit of Simak’s larger oeuvre. The one other book I explored on Goodreads is Way Station. Out of their Minds – his 1970 book maps out impossible border-crossings, btw what is considered the imaginary proper and the real, btw fictional and the hard facts, an illegal border crossing that has become very casual, increasingly acquiring agential character, operativity and universality. What is most endearing about it – is that this book does not make any grandiose theoretical claims. Also, it is not the first piece of fiction to incorporate a theory about fiction in its fictional story mesh, even if it still is a first person POW witnessing weave. Above all, such alarmist blurring of real/weird/strange is incredibly exciting and disturbing. Today we hear it everywhere – ‘meme magic’ is omnipresent, and it is almost immediately related to some trauma linked to toxic meme wars or the rise of the most unsavory NRx neoreactionary doctrines. From payed troll factories, Reddits to 4chan dunk memes, everybody is thrilled to be playing a speculative sorcerer’s apprentice – while reality keeps unwinding, with everybody either profiting or decrying the banned and orphaned creations taking over their creators (with a caveat – that almost all pop imaginary characters are now owned by a few humongous IP franchises). Even before all that, for Simak’s very human heroes and heroines, it is a dangerous and mortal time. They are almost accidental suffering the effects of this unhuman encounters. They are mostly agnostics, convinced materialists and what one might call practical people. Outer dimensions (in both Lovecraft’s or Simak’s) in keep naturally endangering very down to earth non-fictional human creatures.
While clearly being a non-believer is not an option, then not being one of those creatives of franchised worlds, or crackpot speculators or a purveyors of incensed theories about the world becomes life-threatening as well. Trying to keep factual, grounded, mechanistic-materialistic is risky as hell and seem to be part of a certain post-truth naivete. One does not have to strive for a poor imagination today, since for many it is still a question of a collective incapacity to imagine the effects of inequalities. Imagination is always under “crisis”, there is always a threat to imagination – a threat of both “not imagining” the horrendous effects of climate change as well as the “lack of imagining” a better, less damaging future.
Maybe the difference btw getting burned by dragon fire or squashed by a Godzilla, blown by a tornado or suffering a radioactive meltdown was never so clearly drawn. Since the stakes become so large, the scale is so spread-out, the situation already hyperobjectual, the choice of being a superheroine, a Pokemon monster and/or a supervillain is almost a requirement. Being mere mortals means being dis-empowered, exposed, unemployable, red-lined, or uninsured against the most obnoxious threats that do not figure on any insurance policy. Outside the incredibly remote (and quite horrifying) existence bubble of Norman Rockwell’s 1950s whitewashed suburbia, an increasingly less and less idealized Western contemporary reality abounds, blocking out all those unthinkable truths, where very real ‘only imagined’ (imaginary just for the privileged few) lives and dystopian neverlands abound. Imagination in fact is very important not in its selective capacity or (like consciousnesses) but like reason able to unsettle – the old opinions. It is actually the only possibility to experience (even relate to) what is beyond the experiential horizon. It can offer you a relatively safe passage trough a Black Hole, or ascertain what might happen when jumping btw Star-Gates. It can even allow to metamorphose into a bug, an impossible insectoid other. It is also not just an easy reversal phantasy – permitting someone privileged to easily exchange places and face the terrors felt by those whose very lives are a constant struggle to make by and support their livelihood however they can. Mind you – these expunged ‘outer’ is only ‘other’ for the minds of Western Euro-American gated mental worlds. It is not just a matter of exchangeable perspective and of consciousness, that one cannot approach easily such scifi Nigerian reality as the one aptly described by Tade Thompson in Rosewater (Wormwood Trilogy). This one will stay as unreal, safely tucked away ONLY if fortified and encased withing the ever more selective – transmedia bubble. Imagination is infused by very real realities that one dares not think of, not only with ‘fabulous beasts’, and all these movements and border crossings, larger realities insist on everybody with a life of their own and even with a politics of their own.
While action-packed – Out of Their Minds speaks powerfully and cogently about how all existing (no just simply mind- based) creations past, present or future were never our own. The lack of control over our lives is mirrored by such inner mental permeability that was always there. We only know dare talk or allow for a wider, much more unstable (panpsychist?!) world. And this does not singularize human reason – it just brings the same wider response-abilities into cosmic play. In a way for Simak it is exactly the opposite of being locked-in, quarantined imaginary creations can never stay locked for long. They swap genes & mutate almost at the expense of every other living beings. Simak opens up the question of how we might bear response-ability for animating such slippery imaginary surfaces. Out of Their Minds – makes clear that there is no brain-barrier to keep things out or permanently in. Yes, minds are just a station, busy hosting a wider world, not just passive replicators of memes, since they do physically suffer the effects of these imaginary fevers good or bad. Minds are not boxes where mere ‘ideology’ takes place, where superstition or for that matter artistic or poetic creation abounds. What Out of Their Minds offers us is a pervasiveness of such imaginary proclivity, a tropism of what was never confined to minds (or human minds). We get this by following the mis-behaviour the misadventures of non-containable non-self-contained or impermeable processes that allow impossible combination, that shout each other out (like Godzilla monster during nuptial season), carrying with them sense-surround of unhuman-mindfulness or what does not get carried into minds.
This maybe extends to various historical constructions, the invention of tradition, official accounts of the way it played out in various periods of human history. Not to slip in cultural relativism, realities escape minds even faster than they escape history book, taking a life of their own – becoming extremist revival paradises (or hells depending). The abuse of historical middle ages is such a case in study. A reality stocked up by national feelings, money & grandiose monuments of a fabulous past, ethno- glorious fantasies enlivened by movies, fiery speeches and historical novels – do cut, burn and slash.
Historical reenactments (what is normally not regarded as mere cosplay) recruit volunteers, perform and do search for extras to engage them in imagining various battles (such as the American Civil War in Simak’s novel). People do dress up willingly for various historical occasions playing their favored version (enemy or friend), giving their own ethno-political spin to local medieval history. What was disregarded as poorly researched Christian Neo-Templar knighthood gameplay (as in Breivink’s manifesto’s) or puritanical Moslem Wahhabite return to Islam’s origins has a life of its own, it feed-fwd into the present. A new book (which i have no read) – The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (2020) by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant practically takes the preferred versions of today’s nationalistic Middle Ages at their face value, although, as mentioned above, I would not put the blame just on experts or just the Devil’s historian masterminds.
Firstly Clifford D Simak does not separate older from newer imaginary (past and present fabulations) creations (in a sense I would not even call them creations since this always presupposed a creator or a clock-maker) and this I find intensely attractive. These past fictional productions are never past, they do not just peter out. Following the book’s trail, one might say they just have difficulty intermingling, niche-sharing and coexisting with the new imaginary. There is definitely a social life of imaginary beings (what one might call today call tulpas, egregore or thought-forms), busy vying for attention and energy input. Simak in fact takes good old Devils – in a sense key trickster players of Christian demonology (Satan, Baphomet) and searches for their feelings and thoughts about revolutions of the mind, older worldviews being upended. What are the hegemonic imaginary battles that we ignore? Simak makes their position heard about, it makes them whine and be reproachful (to humans), complaining like border patrols or populist politicians about the unregulated flux of new imaginary migrants/aliens (the initial complaint is about UFOs).
Why does ‘ancien regime’ fabulation resent the new UFO or extraterrestrial beings, that steal the limelight? One has to speculate on that.
If there are rules in the out-of-the-mind realms, and if somebody refuses to play along with the old rules then there is a revolution that keeps on fomenting and spilling over. One might even say we see just the smoke trail of the imaginary happenings with very real stakes already going on (with new speculative fiction by non-European, trans, non-binary writers leading the way) fronted by Thade Thompson, Rivers Solomon, Sofia Samatar, Nndi Okarafor, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Arkady Martine and many others. One can say this is just one of very few places where the good and the new seems to prevail. In a sense the conspiracy of “out of the minds” is not of mindful of things (altough that maybe also it) but the fact that nothing stays long in the mind, and it seems to speak about the all-out influx that feels partially motivated by the same belief in (big ‘T’) Tradition. The Devil of Simak is the deviltry of “perennialism” and of harkening back at the top and repackaging any new as same old same old same old.
It feels as if only certain imaginary worlds got right of passage and they want to make it exclusive. There is this desecrated and maybe redolent imaginary realm that cannot keep up with itself. The artificial mock-outrage of Devils that are fighting for order and respect holds such ironic justice is very close to home. What cosmic joke! The continuous production of new and more outlandish imaginary denizens has swamped the old segregation fiction/non-fiction apartheid. Clifford D Simak’s has this imaginary ecosystemic cross-over and Great Faunal Floral Imaginary Exchange spill over from the ‘outer’ into something else, here ‘outer’ and ‘else’ can both mean the unthinkable and post-probabilistic. Instead of the Copyrighter’s Inquisition and controlled usage, we have a place where Pluto Disney dogs, Tasmanian devils or Ren’s and Stimpy’s might run amok and disturb the golden sleep of dragons, no matter how much IP and fines are unleashed by the IP owners.
We could also say that the worst of the current toxic imaginary climate stocked up by online hate, let’s say the most horrific creations of racism and antisemitism can end up swamping minds (jumping epochs). The worst of Middle Ages, child sacrifices, etc vampirism, etc ends up possessing not only minds, but circulating outside of skulls. We see how they are literally taking over the most placid and seemingly naive Internet cartoon creatures, weaponizing the blandest and most dunk elements out there. Low-brow vs elite culture wars are no more ‘outer’ than say the most ludicrous and sadistic bot-edited Peppa the Pig entering your child’s YT search. They are as vivid and offer the same proclivity as the so called- fixed theologically verified hierarchies of archangels and heruvims of old. That is why, at this particular turn of events, the forgotten gnostic proclivity of rearranging worlds rings familiar. The gnostics are an early (almost since the beginning branded as ‘dangerous’ by the crystallizing proto-orthodoxy) expression of such counter-expertize, of such unseeming reversals, unsettling temporarily all the hierarchies of heavens (call the unreal or what lies outside of immediate experience). This is why in Simak’s story, the Devil seeks some sort of truce, some sort of economical exchange of the imagination with their mindless host humans that should be made response-able as potential allies in damming and dampening this all-out disruptive imaginary. The main character cannot but accept and diplomatically deal with the unruly material imaginary beings or events of the outer-realm when he is exposed to their action, to their overflow. He is listening only when he is swamped by the invading imaginary hordes that make havoc waking world, bending his reality from the outside in. ‘A crisis of imagination’ in this restricted sense might mean exactly this – the fact that only certain visions and imaginative futures gain upper hand at certain historical turning points or get right of transit from one side to another. As reality became stranger than fiction, none of the damaging fictions retreated peacefully, letting themselves exiled or mercifully euthanized. On the other hand, clearly, since at least 1989, certain forms of utopian thinking have been slowly petering out, while other forms of repressive imagineering have been gaining currency and even financial support, crowding and blotting out any alternative. Things are hopefully changing with a new generation of freshly unreal ideas, with pessimism of the mind and optimism of the deed cooperating for a less oppressive world building.
Out of their Minds also makes clear that the rules of the imaginary world do not stick to just the flat-eartherish variants, or the anti-Newtonian or even anti-Einstein kinds. They mutate and release their consequences onto the creatures that inhabit such worlds. There is a chance for the endangered humans (and many other more-than humans) critters that enter in and out of the imaginary realm that they must obey its rules. Both real and imaginary beings must make sure they survive their own sometimes arbitrary and aberrant rules. Always good to feel the G pulling even when leaving earthly gravitation. If in fairy tale world you can ONLY make three wishes, then 3 wishes it is. If Superman is vulnerable to Kryptonite, then so be it.
Fictionalization and hyperstition under capitalism (aren’t financial abstractions a painful and very effective way to see terrible capitalist imagineering or meta-fictions at work?) have channeled libidinal forces, extracted value and secured an increasingly powerful role by actively devaluing all other value forms (call them virtualities, utopian flights of fancy, reveries etc as u want), basically pushing to extinction (or at least in very restricted reservations) all other ways of imagining otherwise. On the surface at least this is nothing particularly new, one can say that in the past, imaginary beings, spirits, sprites, various entities have always had to play it out against newer or former brethren although some form of symbiosis was always present (sic how Buddhism integrated older Bon nature spirits or Christianity the pagan deities and calendrical annual celebrations). The history of religions calls it syncretism and it is none other than (also) a symbiosis of the imagination. At the same time in late capitalism there has been always a more monopolistic, corporative and insidious way to incorporate and centralize older more heterogenous local animisms. A pluralism of spirits and multitude of demons gives way to prefab imperial personality cults. One such XX c transformation is the ominous Emperor cult of Japan – its construction specifically linked with the destruction of local shrines and their efficiency-trimmed reformatting, remolding the old chaosmos into a nationalistic weaponized matrix able to accomplish inhuman feats of violence and suffering.
Well, in the view of Out of Their Mind and Well and its fictional theory of an animated imaginary worlds – weird, shape-shifting realism is here to stay. Even being exposed to such theories accomplishes the unspeakable (here he joins Lovecraft and the Yellow King). Once thinking and playing with the idea that there might be intrusions and that imaginary friends (Slender men creepypasta) you’re done. The imaginal theories empower imaginary intrusions. Far from the Stanford – Rand Corporation – Arpanet early stirrings of Internet and networking, this book does not make an appeal to any notion of virtual reality or a simulated universe. In fact, Simak’s version of the imaginary – barely escapes the ruthless Selfish-Gene evolution, a sort of stripped neo-Spencerian Social-Darwinism of the unreal. Luckily, imaginary creatures do tend to cooperate and even socialize with us and even strike a truce, even while exchanging pieces of themselves at the moment mostly seems in our disadvantage, they are not really trying hard to make us memetically -replaceable.
As an addition to “OUt of THeir Minds” I find excellent a recent book by Jimena Canales. Enlarging the scope of imaginary beings to including the scientific imaginary – she includes daimons that have been plaguing and animating thought experiments since the Greeks, non-superstitious imaginary beings that enliven the works of Descartes and Maxwell. Here we have something else indeed it seems, demonic creatures that have been lured by science and that can teach us something about physics and cosmology no matter how inhuman and more-than-human they might appear. Beguiling guiding spirits that can even fool our sense of consensual reality, reshape philosophical questions and change statistical odds in ways that never seemed possible before. They threaten the energetic and informational conservation laws of the universe and by so doing teach us something of great survival value. I have not read Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (2020) but it seems such an important addition to this ongoing discussion. Let us take a cue from such imaginary – but thoroughly- scientific beings, adept at making their devilish predecessors permanently retire.
TimeSpace Warps 