“Discover the most complex virtual ecosystem I’ve ever seen in a video game. An exploration of the unexpectedly brilliant worldbuilding of the indie game Rain World.”
(Part 2: https://youtu.be/f8iJpFFmIN0)
Tag Archives: speculative biology
2217 – The Biology of Subnautica (2022 documentary)
This is the full version of the 4-episode miniseries on Subnautica and Below Zero. A nature-documentary exploration of Planet 4546B (Planet 4546B is located in the outer reaches of the Ariadne Arm, orbiting around the star 4546.)
— Curious Archive Social Media: // Twitter // Instagram
“The vast oceans of the video game Subnautica and its sequel Below Zero teem with incredible life — some friendly, and some deadly. While the series is focused on survival, the lifeforms of Subnautica are amazing even when they’re trying to eat you: possessing fascinating biology, bizarre behavioral patterns, and hidden mysteries.
I’ve explored the various creatures of the series before on my channel, and in this special compilation episode — you can get the full, documentary-style experience in one video. From the sunlit shallows to the deepest abyss, we’ll explore the biology behind these puzzling aliens, and discover the role they play in their larger ecosystems.”
2063 – La nuit des rois/Night of the Kings (2020 movie)
timespace coordinates: Ivory Coast, Western Africa early 21st century
“Night of the Kings (French: La Nuit des rois) is a feature drama/fantasy film directed by Philippe Lacôte (a film director from Côte d’Ivoire). Announced in 2017 under the working title Zama King, the film premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, with a follow-up screening at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival where it won the Amplify Voices Award. The film was one of two films featured in the Spotlight section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. It won the Black Film Critics Circle Award for Best International Film, the African American Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Film and the NAACP Image Awards 2021 for Outstanding International Motion Picture.”(wiki)
I do not pretend I can go into the subtilities or cultural specificities of this movie, but I consider it one of the best movies I have seen lately. There has been a lot of talk about what is cinema and what is not cinema in the age of streaming services and “devaluing of content”, with famous Hollywood directors and then critics jumping in.
Night of the Kings shows how shallow is such talk is or how it is mainly framed or defined inside a very limited arena – ignoring both non-European/Euroamerican cinema or how it tends to ignore the arrival of the post-cinematic. It’s eminently easy to trash most of Western Hollywood blockbuster cinema – as repetitive drivel (which it is) or a heteronormative sequel-autophagia and shameless fanservicing. It’s perfectly OK to blame the sequel industry or the Netflix production money machine. Yet there’s is also something affirmative to new non-Euroamerican movies (or say fictions in general) – that goes beyond mere questions of taste or basic film critique – showing us the current blindspots and unspoken presuppositions and expectations of such a ‘constructed’ public.
Movies like The Night of the Kings point towards what lies outside of that limited horizon. We’re all restricted by our local comfort or supposedly global netizen status. We do this only by sticking with what is shoveled at us and ignoring all those movies out there. This is a direct example that we’re never done with ‘provincializing Europe’ (or the Global North) in Dipesh Chakrabarty‘s immortal phrase. The question is not about expecting the unexpected but attending to and allowing these other lives and other perspectives to breakthrough. The movie’s setting is inside the fictionalized MACA (infamous) prison a Royaume (realm) that is a world within a world, with to the central role of storytelling and narrative framing by the West African prisoner griot that embodies this rich oral storytelling tradition.
Global SF authors like Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Machine Mandate universe) and Tade Thompson (Wormwood cycle) writing in English – have been pointing out how annoying and puzzling it might feel to a diasporic non-Western writer to explain to a so-called ‘typical’ audience that their world-building is inspired by actual events or living cultures or that even SF editors might consider their worlds as inconceivable or improbable inventions. That is – these properly ‘SF’ aspects of their fictions, terminologies or traditions are not exactly fictions since they are closely inspired by a reality that appears completely ‘unreal’ (or automatically SF) to the average Western/Global North commercial public (also a construct of audience polls, micro-targeting & marketing ploys), or one that lies completely outside the experiential or multicultural knowledge bounds of a white Eurocentric/US audience. Explanations feel empty if the model public is centered only around a Western sensorium and reception that remains aloof and for the most part an isolated, posh, and prosperous cultural backwater juggling the same tired references and the same dusty canon on displays over and over again.
Even with Black or Asian actors starring in successful Hollywood movies – there is sadly rarely a radical change in the overall worldview of those Western-inflected perspectives represented.
I am not trying to essentialize non-Western differences – just trying to trace how difficult it is to make room for such movies as The Night of the Kings that have a 99% African crew or that actually play on the welcome absence of the usual metropoles of the cinematically overfamiliar Global North (Tokyo, Paris, New York, Berlin, London, Los Angeles etc.) that serve as a backdrop to imagining our contemporary 21st c world. They also refer to world events that nearly nobody remembers (such as the first Ivorian civil war 2002-2004 or the 2010 second Ivorian civil war) or that have this rapidly effacing “‘half-life’ of a disaster ” under disaster capitalism. We’re reminded that the contemporary world happens mostly elsewhere than the Eroatlantic! Also, there is (happily!) less need for the usual business center-skyline as a silver lining for superheroes jumping, saving or destroying the world. None of these typical Marvel Universe – highrise shots marking the Western pop imaginary.
We see the Lawless Quarter slum of Abidjan from the perspective of the locals combined with the usual drone perspective – a bird’s eye view perspective that we got used to from countless movies. At the same time recent history tells us a parallel history of the drone in Africa. African civilians have been more and more at risk from drone strikes since the US/CIA has stepped up its drone warfare capabilities. This movie does not touch upon such an ominous military presence in the life of civilians but nevertheless, it’s hard to decouple such existing technologies and realities influencing the lives of so many people.
There is a series of stories within stories – there is the larger frame of Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu) as the fallen Dangôro, the sick king and the god of La MACA prison that anoints a new young and hapless inmate (Bakary Koné) as the new Roman – playing both sacrificial lamb and storyteller in what seems like a violent transition of power. The various factions and form an inmate group that starts to sing (like an antique choire), dance and accompany the story of Roman -. of his former boss and urban legend Zama King that was recently killed. He has to hold up their attention in order to survive the Red Moon Night. Zama King – is a historical figure, one of “the handyman for the new leaders of the country,” in the words of Roman, one like many other young men that become a temporary hero of the northern rebel leaders. Zama King was only one of those young men with political backing that felt emboldened to turn chance to their advantage.
The story of the impromptu griot – also includes a coastal African kingdom and what appears to be an episode completely different historical era, one that nevertheless is intertwined with current events. It is a history of love, deceit and sorcery. The life of the local legendary trickster Zama King of the Microbe gang member of slum dwellers intertwines and follows the same route or ordeals as those of other times and remote events. His childhood, subsequent adoption – are all open to invention & revision. Visually we are presented with so much detail that it hard to focus or take in all at once. There are also different kinds of temporality and intentionality going on exemplified in different versions of the same story. Different retellings of the same history differ. Place mutates and alters the linear time flow of the MACA. Its power is more ominous – than what seems initially as a self-contained prison world. Besides the inmate audience, there are also the guardians hiding – and surveilling and having a stake in the unwinding story.
Structural racism under capitalism always incarcerates black bodies – the US has one of the biggest inmate populations in the words. In very different place (but related in terms of both racism, colonalism & slave trade), MACA feels distant from outside events, yet within the walls of its carnivalesque experience there is an ominous invisible presence of former colonial masters – the French troops that have kept a hold on Abidjan. These are the strengths of such a movie, one that does not follow the usual Enlightenment tropes carried along by the Western linear timeline of ultimate progress and totalizing framework. There is not so much a blurring of fiction and reality – but a heightening of the survival value of fiction. The ceremonial role of West African griot storytelling does not stay purely ceremonial or static but is involved in all the making and remaking of power, its vaccilations, reconstructions, modulations and interruptions. Fiction takes on this important role of continuous reworking histories, of improvising (out of need or under pain of death), of a general way in which speculative fiction (contemporary or traditional) is supposed to convey a sense of intensified realism in extreme situations. Nothing is neutral – and the storyteller is never sure of himself or of his own spinning. Roman is revising on the go and continuing interrupted stories he can only abandon with his life forefeited. Ending a story means death in a literal sense. The death of the story, its proper ending is not only the end of the movie (like in 1001 Night Islamic Arab cycle of famous stories) but the uncertain continuation under uncertain times. The audience is emprisoned by the story, not just because one is desperate to hear the end, but because it is already taken hostage, it cannot abstract, it cannot run away but is forced to find a way, to intervene, to shape the story with the means available.
Death is never far – and never just about sequels – it may be a play yet is is a play that keeps death at bay, that invents unexpected twists so that the knot of life can keep tight. In a sense we are prisoners of our time and space, of our culture and mores, of our biases and we can never completely escape them. Nothing can be totalized into a single univocal whole, and what exists or gets perceived is shaped by what lies to these situated and per-force limited perspectives (also explored by the paradoxo-metaphysic account of indexicalism in the recent book by Hilan Bensusan). Reality is not primarily substantive but first defined by a here and a there according to the speculative realism of Hilan Bensusan. There is much to say about how a non-traditional Western African griot time travels and even how the film director is a kind of contemporary griot.
There is much to say about many things – including the easy way VFX combine with the overall beauty (and brutality) of the movie. How the battles are happening on many levels. Imaginary creatures, local heroines or invisible forces play an important part in The Night of the Kings, including the fact that it is always a plural as in Kings not A King (not Lord of the Rings). It is overall a magnificent movie. Please take my word on it and watch it asap!
2004 – Discognition: Fabulations and Fictions of Sentience by Steven Shaviro (book, 2016)
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.
1863 – Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (book by Ben Woodard, 2012)
[[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:
Illustration for Clark Ashton Smith’s The Tale of Satampra Zeiros ; Andrea Beré
1812 – Synthetic Biology (animation by VantageFilms 2018)
This is a visual essay exploring the future technology of synthetic biology. In recent years there have been major breakthroughs in DNA editing. Making it inexpensive and precise to modify and or combine living organisms to our design specifications. Through the combination of organic and mechanical archetypes into new forms, we wanted to stir the imagination of designers and engineers. The goal of this project is to spread synthetic biology into the sci-fi communities. To help us visualize the design and engineering possibilities that this technology can bring to us in the future. https://www.behance.net/gallery/66208181/Synthetic-Biology
TimeSpace Warps 