2299 – I’m a Virgo (2023 series)

timespace coordinates: alternative present-day version of Oakland, California

I’m a Virgo is an American absurdist comedy television series created by Boots Riley and starring Jharrel Jerome. The first four episodes premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in March 2023. All seven episodes were released on Amazon Prime Video on June 22, 2023.

I do not have much to add to what Zimbabwean writer, filmmaker, and leftwing cultural critic Charles Mudede noted in his The Stranger column (this is how I basically found out about it) titled “What Is More Surreal, Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo or Capitalism?”. Read it!

Boots Riley is another one of those directors that straddles the divide btw musical video and cinema, smuggling technologies from one media into the other with various visual styles, animation and practical effects. A the same time I wonder if it actually manages to play with instances of what Steven Shaviro has called post-cinematic affect a while ago. In short:

Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities.

Post-Cinematic Affect, 2010

DIVIDE AND REBRAND

What can we add after more than 10 years? And why bother in 2023 with the “affluent West” that doesn’t give a hoot about the vast majority living on the planet (especially read Dean Baker’s recent sanguine article “The Chinese Need to Stay Poor because the United States Has Done So Much to Destroy the Planet“? Why make MARXsplaing a superpower in a world where knowledge about exploitation and anti-unionization by the Big Tech is not novelty nor is it chains: it is all widely available. I enjoyed this series like I never enjoyed any other lately, but I am also puzzled by how little it expresses of the wider concerns of a world in which we today. Is it just me or is Oakland, and California in particular – left as the only microcosm of everything everywhere? This is why I need to look what is missing or what does not fit into this patchwork.

Today it is easy to think the Euroatlantic as one single bloc (precisely because of Sweden and Finland joining NATO) but lines of demarcation are becoming clearer and clearer. The funny shitty thing is that Romania (together with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined this military alliance in 2004. This was the reinvention of this military alliance – having the former East join not just EU but a Cold War relict. The East was happy and willing. Nowadys this “security measure” does not fare well at the moment. We know that the US is awash in guns and that violence and the militarization of the police. After 9/11 War Come Home is here to stay. But now Ukraine and the whole region is bound to become a sort of Texas awash in cluster bombs, mines and weaponry. In a sense NATO was in need of a facelift, either expansion or going to the history’s “dustbin of history”. My point is that what is happening with NATO nowadays is also happening with the Big Tech nowadays. They are in bad need of a rebrading to prove their worth to their shareholders.

MUSKISM AND TOY FOUNDERS

We live in a world of founders. They dominate our mediaspace, our news, even the most extra-terrestrial spaces. They are the biggest polluters on the planet, wrecker of civilizations, SF fans and longtermism sponsors. What to make of the recent baptizing of Google into Alphabet, and Facebook into Meta or Twitter into X. Are they tired or bored with themselves?

Things seem much more clear cut than 10 years ago. Living in between worlds, between the so-called former East (basically the sworn ideological enemy of the Free World) and the affluent West during the COVID pandemics has also brought home several lessons. This is not about Schengen Visas for Bulgaria and Romania, but about the fact that these buffer zones have become the internal detentions and border patrol zones of the whole of Fortress Europe.

On a larger scale, there is talk about trade wars, about decoupling and moving SC manufacturing back from ASia and dressing up evrything as “de-risking”. In the liberalized, privatized and fragmented East, in the meantime, the questioning of so-called Western values did not come out of nowhere. The East has been leading the far right and Euroskepticism wave, adopting anti-immigration policies, anti-abortion ethno-politics with Poland and Hungary being the closests examples and this should also be seen as part of the economic globalization and financialization of the planet. This brings the East closer to the US, but not primarily because of NATO integration or via military bases & black sites, but by joining the right wing culture wars from across the Altantic and their anti-woke measures.

GIGANTIC EXPENDITURE

More than 10 years after the Post-cinematic Affect, the world keep ending, with record-breaking scorching temperatures for July all over the planet, pandemics, rising budget and rearmament, Sinophobia, Tik Tok hearings in the US Congressput, everything is becoming more and more paroxystic and unilavable. “Opting out” is banded before everyone by the rich. Un-democractic “special zones” have sprung where investors are lured in with low taxes and pro- investement policies. It is clear that the 1989 we did not re-unification of East and West. What we had was an East that looked towards the West (Go Weeeest Life is Better There etc.) with open wide-open starry eyes, asking for democratic changes and prosperity (which in many cases translated to just usual consumer goods such as jeans or walkman). Nowadays, after a brutal restructuring and free market liberalization of the East you could conclude that the West ended up simply engulfing the East.

RISING WARLORDISM

Is the East akin to the gigantic black naive kid “Big Muthaf***a,” Cootie (played by Jharrel Jerome)? Have they been self-colonizing, fed by Channel TV, by reality TV, by North American Comic Book Industry (like Alin Rautoiu amply demonstrates in an in-depth article). Did they realize they are the evil empire of the Star Wars? Did they forget the exotic Eastern Marxist tradition and be lectured and wesplainged by the Western Marxists?

Clearly the East is not sticking to the rules, or to the role it has been dealt by recent history. Instead of being this pacified, at the Portal of Balkans, the Milk and Honey (in a Karl May turn-of-speech) region where freedom and pacifism follows automatically from free markets, it is now producing havoc on the world markets and famine in Africa. it is bombarding its own people. It is split in a hundred nationalisms. It still does not want to get compared with the Near East, with the Syrian War or the Lybian post-Ghadafi warlordism, altough Eastern Europe (specifically Eastern Ukraine) makes everything look like a unsuccessful series of Orange Revolutions.

What is hard to accept is that the East stopped being the orphan street child glue sniffer or the problem-child of Transition years – and now appears in the Western media as either the bombarded, abused, victimized of war-crimes or the criminal hoodlum. Is the East affluent? Not really but it is a place where the ner-equivalent of the Big Tech founder is the oligarch (or the seller of SHIT in Triangle of Saddness movie), that most despicable of the plutocrats, basically the nouveau riche to the West’s old money. Yes, the CEO figure founder is also one of the most memorable villains in recent history, and he a Bezos and Musk turned vigilante, or Batman being the good capitalist. But in the end all of them are Mattel CEOs – toy figure, precious collectibles that is actually completely absurdly concentrating immense wealth and power.

BLACKOUTS IN THE WEST AND EAST

When I’m a Virgo speaks to Eastern Europes it speaks in fast foods. It is not the place of where the poor eat shitty unhealthy food, but places of luxury. After 1989 the MacDonalds and Burger Kings where received like Kings and ambassadors in the East, people of the rising middle classes enjoyed having a burger there. It was American Living – the highest standard of living in the world no?

Meanwhile the wheels have turned and the fragmented East pays back the US, inspiring the anti-woke US conservatives and crack-up capitalists. Boots Riley cannot address these things, yet we can ask why they ring closer to home? In the 1980s, basically my teenie years, in Socialist Romania, severe austerity measures where imposed in order to pay out the external debt incurred by the state in the 1970s. Blackouts where part of this and using candles or not having heating became normalized. There is a grim kind of blackout solidarity, of course not addressed by the series, but a very familiar to me and others.

After the 1989 revolutions, blackouts continued, and they even affected entire hoods at the time. They where also part and parcel of a decaying public infrastructure that could not keep up with the demand. What was evident to me at that time was that the new malls and their parking lots had electricity during the blackouts. The Blackout did not have to do with an energy crisis, with green transition or rising prices but had to do with development in some part and unequal and simultaneous underdevelopment in many others. The distribution of the blackout followed a strange map drawn by the market economy and the way infrastructures responded to various stresses.

Like Cootie, in Eastern Europe we have been fed on US goods since early childhood and have been using all sorts of clothes, mostly recycled from the West (Germany, US, Italy etc.) in my case. Nothing fits, and nothing seemed to fit for a long time. Everything had to be adopted, changes. Everything had to be refitted and customized, and the effect is often hilarious or embarassing. People where drawing their own versions of superheroes in the early 1990s (like a comics from the mountain city of Brashow with Bravman as a local hero). T-shirt with band names such as AC/DC got drawn by hand and worn because everyone secretly wanted to be part of the sports or music culture of the US. This ended up with various mismeasures, and while this whole series is about black bodies and the systemic racism of today, it is also about the feeling like a contemporary Alice in a US Capitalalaand.

After 1989, in the East (and not he East Coast) but in Eastern Europe, everything was made to feel Pantagruelic and not only in the sense of Bakthin. We started riding huge SUV, Jeeps and HUMMER cars. Cars that where bigger than our badly maintained streets. Bigger than the available parking lots, and mostly pushing a lifestyle dependent on a fossil economy that prioritised car culture over public transport, highways over biking or pedestrian walking. I also remember basketball truly arriving at our shool and breakbeat. It also arrived with the “popular kid” pressure – being popular started being important in the early 1990s and the most popular kids in the class where vying for Chicago Bulls vs LA Lakers (they also had the T-shirts). Everything started being upside down, oversized or undersized. You went to Pizza Hut to celebrate with mom and dad. Houses started being built up for luxury real estate reasons not for housing purposes. It got important to have luxurious facades, luxury elevators in run-down communist bloc trying to attract the “proper” clientelle. This brings me back to entire buildings go up and down while the CEO does not move an inch. The CEO figure in the East is actually someone who is allied with the American-Romanian University.

That being said, in order to make sense of the world we live in, maybe there is less and less sense in taking refuge from in Marvel superhero blockbuster (where you might end up being the villain), but find some sort of communal hysteria living beside and with the wacky, the mindfucked and the mad surreal absurdist wokers of Sorry To Bother You (2018) that manage to make a parody of a parody. All certitudes are left behind in this unhinged and normal abnormal world of bullshit jobs and false consciousness we live in. Including the sense and the remaingin fact that Amazon Prime has made I’m A Virgo another toy in its toy collection, an inhabitant of Amazon (sub)Prime-land that togheting with Netflix, Apple+ Disney+ making it more difficult for all of us to inhabit the world.

2033 – The Spine of Night (2021 animation)

timespace coordinates: an imaginary mythical time on a violent forlorn planet, not very unlike our own.

“The Spine of Night is a 2021 adult animated dark fantasy horror film written and directed by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King.^[1] It stars Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, and Joe Manganiello.

The film was completed using rotoscoped animation, and traces the centuries long journey of a magical plant that bestows terrible power upon the user, as it inspires despots, empires, and black magic.” (wiki)

This has to be one of the highlights of animation in recent years – but not if one dreams for a more peaceful, pacifist or a non-violent (better) world. Ripping hearts out, dissolving meat off the bones, cutting people in half or dismemberment – a recurrent and very common characteristic of Spine of the Night. Lots of eerie blue phosphorescent flowers and lots of gaping skulls projected on starry skies. Heroic fantasy or sword & sorcery (especially the work of REH/R.E. Howard) was big bang moment for me and it was always pretty bloody and tactless. Altough, I must say it came with its own culturally specific ‘mirth’ – for these imaginary worlds were concocted by REH, and distributed by (Marvel) comics before the books came around (few of those in my collection too). Worlds I briefly inhabited got poached from smuggled comic books (Savage Sword of Conan, King Conan, Conan the Barbarian) arriving in ‘aid packages’ from my aunt in the US across the Iron Curtain to a kid in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Conan the Barbarian and King Kull of Valusia happen to overlap with my 1980s high school surroundings or my sporadic countryside haunts. Below the Carpathian mountains, around Prahova County, a wild distant hilly forested area, that I entered only much later was just behind the village of my childhood summer vacations. Let’s get this straight I wasn’t a country side kid, more of a city bookworm/documentary geek. Altough from that moment on the hills of Prahova became the realm of Cimmeria – the mythical land of Conan, a place based on a vague Black Sea region during the Greek antiquity.

“CIMMERIA (cca 1932)

by REH

I remember
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds’ leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

Vista upon vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista–hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills, To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,

How many deaths shall serve to break at last

This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts?  I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night”

The gravel on top of the gymnastics/sports hall next to my Bucharest school was strewn with small bones of dead animals. This made a perfect substrate for our Hyborian immersion. To that place where nobody could follow us, we arrived climbing up on a creaky rusty metal ladder – and in the distance we started seeing the rooftops shapes and church towers that would transform into temples of Mitra…

Conan, King Kull, Valeria, Thulsa Doom, Red Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), Grace Jones playing Zula (all pulled from a growing comic book pantheon enlarged by Roy Thomas & Barry-Windsor Smith and others) ended up bringing havoc to an old and corrupt world, swept by sinister cults and pre-human civilisations with walled crumbling cities. These were all heroines and heroes that made civilized life into a sham, never adopting the mores for civilized men and women for long. All thieves, all brigands, tomb raiders, all hailing from the borderlands, the steppes and the forests, all former slaves, orphans or members of a barbarian hinterland that got raided as labor force pool or got sacrificed in the name of unknown gods or blood-thirsty cults. A pean to a neo- barbarian ethos born out of modern Fantasy that did not exist outside the invented Hyborian Age conjured up by that suicidal pulp fiction-writing Texan obsessed with physical culture called Robert E. Howard. There is much to be critical about it now – including a certain Social Darwinist bent – and a kind of might is right. At the same time there’s a sort of materialist common sense attitude of swords that make Gods or tyrants bleed, of sorcery or supernatural or Lovecraftian entities that are not invincible. So there’s always the risk of maybe too much sword and too little sorcery. On the scala of toxic masculinity many abcelebrated Frank Frazetta cover would score pretty high and come across as just reinforcing gender stereotypes, seemingly promoting those undultared, manly, virile, battle-scarred bodies forged in cosmic foundries – at the time of great changes of Fordism labor rights struggles and post-Fordist malaise. Those sweaty – sword wielding (working man) recently unemployed bodies that are so easy to ridicule in movies, as in the recent lumberjack character played with gusto by Nicholas Cage in Mandy. Work and virility was somehow on the go – labor was not only outsourced to a feminized Asia, but the whole regime of formerly unwaged labour, care work included more and more men – a feminization of work that started seeping into what had been once a working class industrial preserve.

Even with the heroic fantasy glorification of berserk battles, heavy metal/doom metal soundtrack & general mayhem, let’s also consider Conan the Barbarian mostly a kind of modern scavenger, a sort of Spartacus outsider that never accepted a warrior lifestyle and that was forced into it. From his initial peaceful village life Conan (in one account) was taken prisoner with other children, was pushed and had to adopt a slave – warrior livelihood, not because he was born into it. Conan used all his anger to mostly strike down civilized lords, power hungry priests and cruel rulers.

Now to this recent animation and how it departs from previous models even if stylistically has much in common with a whole genre of pulp. First in the Conan comics there’s is a certain class and even racial division amongst these pulp savages and barbarians. This is a recognizable colonial (Euro-American) separation of good barbarians vs bad barbarians – even in Conan THE Barbarian. There is the ‘noble savage’ and the rest, an Enlightment era division that has brought much misery and death to countless living native indigenous peoples. So in the comics there is “the Cimmerians” and there is “the Picts” of the Pictish Wilderland (usually a swamp or a jungle rainforest) as par of an extended REH universe. Classified as ‘primitive’, truly vicious they are almost like living examples of Darwinian evolutionary atavism. They are the remains of pulp racist pseudo science, representatives of the irrational primitive archetype, described in dehumanizing terms, as an animal-like – superstitious horde. I think The Spine of Night – even if at the surface tributary to REH universe does a benefic move towards foregrounding these reclusive swamp ‘savages’, their cause, the quest not of warriors or swordsmen but of witches, of pantheist and animist rituals. It also makes explicit the predatory relation of much of these civilisations & cities on this sparsely populated, un-cultivated, yet fertile hinterland. This I consider quite a big departure that puts to shame simplistic pulp comic divisions with a colonial inheritance. The Swamp is finally not a place of unnamed horrors like in Conan the Barbarian, but a place of various forms of life and where a very powerful plant thrives, a plant that is part of the ethno-botanical lore of these human groups. The horror is most likely to arrive with new intrusions, clearings, enclosures and with militaristic ecocidal ideology of brutal conquerors and their henchmen. I sense there’s a possible Bachofenian critique of patriarchy as a historical process, the arrival of a patriarchal order that took pride in treating both nature and women with the same brutality & rapacity. There’s also no passivity here – the swamp people don’t just dissappear and the witch is always coming back and ready to counter the worst of them.

Beside the knowledge vs power narrative there is something else in the Spine of Night – a way in which the great Swamp – is the first to disappear or to fall victim to the empires or to fires, and expansive drives for domination.

Another thing is the dependency of civilization, of the mighty on someone else, even on rare irretrievably lost knowledge, or on something that is non-human (or pre-human) or not recognized any longer as human. Rulers are always dependent on inhuman energies and entities. Or even better – in all their might they show a dependence and encourage the exploitation of a complex – nexus of other humans, their lore and practices and plants (magic flower) & biodiverse environments (swamp, wetlands, marshes). There is no development or spells or even warfare without these (one might recall here Londa S. studies of abortificient plants known to indigenous peoples as well as slaves) ‘political plants’ that are an integral lore of these swamp people in The Spine of Night.

It is the first epic time the actual heroine is a swamp witch, her quest is not the quest of the mercenary barbarian but of a revived cosmic witch queen that makes the last stand against a technologically- empowered, resource-hungry, and knowledge thirsty imperial power represented by a man, a former scholar. I am not going into details – and I think the images telling the mythical story of this bloody world are pretty telling because they include the killing of the gods in its cosmogony.

Knowledge or – ancient libraries and scholars are not all evil and corrupt, there is actually a few idealists left and a few dedicated to saving the plebs outside the gate. Yet it is clear that this kind of disdain combined with hoarding of knowledge in search of power brings only doom & destruction. There is also a knowledge that is non-literary, transmitted by oral cultures, what we might call oral/aural culture – so-called illiterate knowledge, one that does not get recorded so easily in the pages of grimoires. Besides the pungent mythical undertones in Spine of the Night – there is also the sense that a lot of specialized, ‘written’ knowledge is definitely growing in complete disregard for its human (humanistic) usage.

Apart of all these brief notes – the Spine of Night animation conveys the best cosmic dark epic doom entertainment since Ralph Bakshi’s collaboration with Frank Frazetta – on Ice and Fire, the 1983 dark epic fantasy rotoscoping masterpiece. Yet, I repeat I do not consider it a mere piece of geek nostalgia per se – but a powerful new and welcome turn of an old animation technique (to be enjoyed and practiced). Visually it is not so much – like a lot of recent animation – one technique, but a kaleidoscope of techniques and technologies both digital & analog, hand-drawn & CGI, combining ‘realist’ rotoscoping style with abstract – dark silhouettes with blazing eyes and patches of ‘bioluminescent’ parafernalia (like characters in the cosmogonic/Titanomachy scenes). Instead of just images of decay, or constant dissolution of forms – animation in Spine of Night is mostly about metamorphoses (like Levitt puts it in her Animatic Apparatus), morphing and melting the boundaries of usual anthropomorphic – figurative shapes. The background art is very effective and stands on its own even without the action – because all the environmental elements are unstable, lines tremble, the sky/cosmos constantly is prone to paraeidolia – skulls get distended & extended into galaxies. One could say in the Titanomachy – god killing scenes, what we see is a cosmogony of the animation process itself, the unseen acts (techniques, technologies, rotoscoping etc) enacting the ani-motion principle, “the artificing of man” (Cholodenko) – the dreams of silent creators, lively nightmarish creations that overtake and revert the roles, rob their creators special effects & take on a life of their own.

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2008

“If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge.

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience.” 

Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe 2010)

2004 – Discognition: Fabulations and Fictions of Sentience by Steven Shaviro (book, 2016)

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.

First here is a draft Intro to his 2016 book Discognition

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.

1809 – The Secret History of Writing (BBC documentary series 2020)

How the invention of writing gave humanity a history. From hieroglyphs to emojis, an exploration of the way in which the technology of writing has shaped the world we live in played in three consecutive parts.

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